Even Odds by Fiona Quinn

Narrated by Steve Marvel

Even Odds is book three in Fiona Quinn’s FBI Joint Task Force series set in her wider World of Iniquus series of interconnected romantic suspense novels. I enjoyed the previous two books – Open Secret and Cold Red, which were narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Troy Duran respectively – and was looking forward to another fast-paced, well-plotted story, but when I sat down to write this review after listening to all ten and a half hours of Even Odds, I realised I had a problem. Narrator Steve Marvel’s narration just isn’t up to the standard set by the other two performers, and it was so distracting that I just couldn’t get into the story. I got the bare bones of the plot, but I’ve probably missed some of the detail.

One of the things I did manage to grasp is that Even Odds continues the plotline begun in Open Secret, and the FBI Joint Task Force crew is continuing to investigate the propaganda/bot farms operating out of Eastern Europe that are spreading misinformation throughout the US with the intention of fomenting distrust and unrest. Former Delta Force operative and now FBI Special Agent in Charge Damian Prescott is part of that team (which also includes Rowan Kennedy from Open Secret), and their current task is to track the movements of one Todor Bilov, a Bulgarian national and member of the powerful Prokhorov family (known to be behind many of the propaganda farms) who has recently arrived in the US. The team learns that Bilov has begun a romantic relationship with a woman named Cammy Burke, who is employed at the Pentagon in the Human Resources department and who, as part of her job, has access to sensitive information about special forces operatives. Bilov is obviously cultivating her as an asset, but the surveillance photographs of the couple prove to be a game changer. Rowan Kennedy recognises the woman as Clara Edwards, the operative with whom he’d worked on his recent mission in Brussels, while Damian Prescott knows her as Raine Meyers, a former Delta Force operative – and his ex-fiancée.

As this book is part of a long-running series, I’m going to assume that Raine’s backstory has been covered in a previous novel; she was captured, tortured and almost put to death while serving in Afghanistan and was rescued in the nick of time by Delta Force’s Echo team. Since leaving the military, she joined the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), and when she learned of a plot that was targeting military wives – threatening them with violence if they didn’t persuade their husbands not to renew their military contracts – Raine saw a way she could at last repay the men of Echo team for saving her life. Already investigating other instances of cyber threats to military wives, Raine was perfectly placed to look into this specific threat and help secure the safety of the women left behind while their husbands are away on active duty.

Once Prescott and his team learn that ‘Cammy Burke’ isn’t just a regular Pentagon employee, they realise that their mission and whatever Raine is working on must be connected somehow and that it would make sense for them to combine forces. I have to confess here that there are chunks of the middle of the book that I just can’t recall accurately – I tried, I really did; I backtracked and listened again, but the droning of the narrator’s voice just blotted out much of what was actually happening. I remember that quite a lot of the early part of the story is told through the FBI team watching the surveillance footage of ‘Cammy’ and Bilov, and then once the two investigations have merged, the framing device shifts slightly so we get more of Raine’s PoV during those interactions.

The romantic thread in this particular story is obviously the second chance afforded to Damian and Raine, who split up several years earlier for reasons that feel flimsy at best. Neither of them has had a satisfactory relationship since but have got on with their lives and careers; I liked that Raine, though highly trained and highly skilled, has started to realise that, at thirty-six, she’s starting to slow down and is beginning to think that maybe she’s done enough and it’s time to retire – at least from field work – and do something else. Their romance is re-kindled when, as part of the plan to draw out whoever is threatening the Delta Force wives, Damian and Raine go undercover as a married couple on the local base. This only happens in the last quarter (or so?) of the book, so there’s not a lot of time for romantic development, but they do manage to talk about their break-up and about their pasts (Raine had an absolutely terrible childhood during which she suffered neglect and physical (not sexual) abuse) and, well, things proceed pretty much as you’d expect on that front.

If you read my reviews regularly, then (I hope!) you’ll know that I like to provide a good amount of detail – without giving away too much – so as to help potential listeners decide whether a particular story or audiobook is for them. On this occasion, however, I apologise for not being able to do that. The problems I had with the narration mean I haven’t picked up on as much detail or nuance as I normally like to; I was prevented from fully understanding much of the story because it was so hard to focus on WHAT was being said as opposed to HOW it was being said. I’d believed Steve Marvel to be a new-to-me narrator, but I soon worked out that I’ve listened to him twice before under another name. Those times, I found some positives about his performance, but both times, the book was a dual narration which not only featured another narrator who made Mr. Marvel sound good by comparison, but also meant he didn’t have to voice all the characters and carry the whole story by himself. Here, however, he’s on his own, and he just doesn’t have the range or skillset needed to voice an audiobook featuring a large cast of characters. I could just about tell the difference between the male and female characters, but basically all the women sounded the same and all the men sounded the same, so I rarely had any idea who was speaking – oh, no, I tell a lie; I could identify Todor Bilov because Mr. Marvel gives him this weird accent and creepy manner that made him sound like Peter Lorre. His characterisation of Raine takes absolutely no notice of the frequent textual reminders that owing to her damaged vocal chords, Raine doesn’t have a normal range of expression and intonation, and that her voice is very flat. Mr. Marvel doesn’t use that information to create a distinctive vocalisation, so Raine just sounds like the other characters and is as indistinguishable from them as they all are from each other. And if there’s any romantic chemistry between Damian and Raine in the book, there’s none here whatsoever, so the romance falls flat, too.

Gah, I could go on, but I think you’ve got the idea by now that the narration ruined the story and that I won’t be listening to Steve Marvel (or his alter-ego) ever again. The trouble is that the poor performance makes it very difficult for me to accurately grade the story. The majority of the reviews on Goodreads and Amazon are four and five stars, so I’m going with a borderline grade because I think the story of Even Odds is probably decent, and it’s not the author’s fault it’s been ruined.

Caz