Feel the Fire by Annabeth Albert

Narrated by Iggy Toma

Feel the Fire is the third book in Annabeth Albert’s Hotshots series set in and around the firefighting community in the fictional town of Painter’s Ridge, Oregon.

Tucker Ryland and Luis Rivera met in school when Luis and his family moved to Painter’s Ridge from California. Tucker and Luis became inseparable and, by the time they were each 16, had realised they had more than friendship between them. They were planning a life together, dreaming as teenagers do, but then Luis’s family moved back to California and the two young men were separated. They kept in touch and planned for Tucker to join Luis in LA after he graduated high school but then Tucker’s dad had a heart attack and Tucker couldn’t leave and he and Luis broke up because reasons.

Shortly after, Tucker married Heidi, a friend from school and they had twin boys. (There’s obviously a story behind it but I won’t say here what it is.)

Now, Tucker and Heidi are amicably divorced and share the coparenting of their 17-year-old sons, Wade and Walker, and Tucker is facing imminent empty-nest syndrome. And, Luis has been asked to come back to Painter’s Ridge to help out the wildfire team with fire investigations, particularly focusing on a suspected arson case. And guess what? Tucker works for the fire department and is in the office right next door!

The two men need to first settle the remaining angst and upset from what happened between them all those years ago, but pretty soon it becomes obvious that their feelings are essentially unchanged and they grow to care for one another even more. Their problems remain however: Luis’s life is in LA and Tucker’s is in Painter’s Ridge.

Luis is gay and out. Tucker identifies as demisexual, on the ace spectrum and more attracted to men than women if I listened right. (He is out to his family but not at work when the book begins.) Mainly, Tucker needs to have a deep emotional connection with someone before he feels any sexual attraction. Hence, Tucker is all but a 35-year-old virgin when Luis comes back into his life. He finds however that his libido is powerfully interested in what Luis has to offer.

In order to get a HEA, Luis will have to move or Tucker will. Exactly how it all works out (and it does, of course – this is a romance after all) was a little unexpected but I think it was perfect for the characters and fit well with the tone of the book.

Iggy Toma narrates and as always, his performance was to a very high standard. He gave Luis a deeper, slightly rougher texture to his voice. Tucker was slightly softer and lighter in tone. I liked the way he depicted Heidi and her (now) husband Isaac and their young daughter, as well as the twins. Each was fairly distinctive and I was easily able to identify who was who in addition to them sounding like I’d expect them to sound like.

My one issue with the narration was probably more a problem with the text and how it translated into audio. There’s a certain amount of pronoun confusion that had me a little puzzled about who was speaking in certain portions of the dialogue between Tucker and Luis. I would think it must be Luis speaking but the dialogue was in Tucker’s voice (or vice versa) which confused me, until later I’d find out that it was actually Luis but from the actual words, I had expected it to be Tucker. If that sounds confusing, join the club!

I don’t have the ebook so it’s difficult to give an actual example from the text but it occurred in circumstances where Luis was speaking and then the next line would refer to “he” and then Tucker would speak. Except because I’d been in Luis’s POV immediately before, I expected the “he” to be Luis and not Tucker. In print this may have been obvious by punctuation or paragraph markers but in audio it was just confusing.

Otherwise, I enjoyed the narration very much.

Even though there is an underlying firefighting and arson storyline, this is not a romantic suspense. The setting is the firefighting community but the story is a second-chance romance which focuses tightly on the main characters navigating their HEA. I loved the depiction of a functional and amicable divorced couple and the broader family they had built together and how seamlessly Luis was gathered into it. Plus, there’s a cat.

Kaetrin

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Buy Feel the Fire by Annabeth Albert on Amazon