Luck of the Draw by Kate Clayborn

Narrated by Will Damron & Carly Robins

I bought Luck of the Draw in ebook last year but I was defeated by my giant TBR. So, I was happy to listen to the audiobook version, particularly after Caz enjoyed the narration by Carly Robins & Will Damron in the first book in the Chance of a Lifetime series, Beginner’s Luck (the ebook of which I did manage to read).

Luck of the Draw stands alone well enough; I don’t think it’s necessary to have read or listened to Beginner’s Luck to enjoy the book but the friendship between the three women who win a lottery together, Kit, Zoe & Greer, is a strong part of the series and each book builds the picture and shows a different aspect of it.

Zoe Ferris is a lawyer but left her high-powered corporate job after the lottery win. She has been planning a big trip (or so she says) for the past six months but she hasn’t really done much. She feels “stuck”. The last case she worked on before she left her previous firm haunts her. It was a wrongful death case where her firm acted on behalf of a pharmaceutical company (aka the bad guy).

Our hero is paramedic Aiden O’Leary. His twin brother, Aaron, died after ingesting medication which was supposed to help his addiction to opioid pain medication. Aiden’s parents sued and accepted a settlement after mediation. The details are sparse and not really relevant to the story (although I will say the whole thing seemed too fast – the law tends to work much more slowly in my experience), but suffice it to say that Zoe feels great guilt for her part in representing the pharmaceutical company. It is her face that the O’Leary’s remember when they think of the mediation conference and it is something she regrets.

In an effort to get “unstuck”, Zoe creates a “guilt jar” and in it, are slips of paper including, among others, the O’Learys. When she goes to their house to apologise in person, she finds Aiden there instead, his parents having moved to Florida. He knows who Zoe is and he’s still grief stricken, so he doesn’t react well to her visit. I was happy that Zoe realised almost immediately the hubris of bobbing up to someone’s house without an invitation to inflict an apology upon them. However, just when she’s about to leave, Aiden appears so she pushes on.

When Zoe offers to “do anything” to atone for her actions (something I didn’t think needed all that much atonement to be honest – it’s not like she killed Aaron after all), Aiden asks Zoe to be his fake fiancée to help him convince the owners of a campground he wishes to buy, to sell to him.

There are a number of potential buyers and the owners have arranged for each of them to attend the camp each weekend for six weeks, and present their vision for the campgrounds should they be successful. The owners feel strongly about their legacy and wish for it to be taken over by someone who will love it as much as they do. Aiden feels he will be disadvantaged by being single when all the other candidates have a family. Hence, his request to Zoe.

As set ups go, it’s a bit thin – the whole six weekends thing felt like something which wouldn’t really happen in real life (who has the time to make that kind of investment for potentially no outcome?) but I don’t fuss too much about this stuff in books. As long as there is internal consistency within the story, I’m pretty much up for whatever gets the main characters spending a lot of time together.

Aiden is angry and Zoe is a convenient person to take it out on but fortunately, this part of the story is over quickly. Instead, both of them are trying to find atonement in their activities at the camp. Aiden’s vision is to buy the campground (with the settlement money) and turn it over to experts who will run it as a wellness/wilderness camp for people recovering from addiction. He wants to do this for Aaron and also to help people so that others will not experience the grief he and his family know.

As Zoe and Aiden work together each weekend, they begin to know one another. Aiden sees there’s far more to Zoe than the buttoned-up and heartless lawyer he first perceived. Zoe, for her part, starts to crack the shell around Aiden and learn the man underneath the gorgeous exterior.

Essentially, apart from Aiden and Zoe falling in love, they are both processing where they are in their lives and deciding how to move on; what to do next and how to heal. Because of the subject matter, there is a melancholy tone to the story, particularly the sections from Aiden’s point of view, narrated by Will Damron. Aiden is clearly depressed for almost the entire book and the narration displays this well.

There are some lighter moments however and the romance is sweet and sexy, the banter between the protagonists showing their growing attraction. Aiden is a recent transplant from Colorado so part of his journey is making friends with his new colleagues at work and Zoe deepens her friendships with Greer and Kit. The other candidates for the campground purchase also feature in the book. Each character felt like they had a life of their own outside the novel and were not just there to highlight something about Zoe or Aiden (although they did that too).

I enjoy Carly Robins’ narration generally although most often I’ve heard her read lighter pieces. She excels with comedy but there is only a little of it in Luck of the Draw so I was curious about how I’d react to this performance. She captured the emotion of the book very well and technically, as usual, her execution was high quality.

I have less experience with Will Damron’s narration. His female character voices weren’t quite as believable as Ms. Robins’ male voices were but otherwise, he definitely nailed the emotion and tone of the book. Both performers enhanced my enjoyment of the story by keeping that emotion front and centre without overplaying it. It was a fine line to walk and both did it extremely well.

Kaetrin