Concrete Evidence by Rachel Grant

Narrated by Greg Tremblay and Nicol Zanzarella

Note: Book published in 2013 – new recording 2021

I’ve read/listened to and reviewed most of the books in Rachel Grant’s romantic suspense Evidence series, and they’re among my favourites in the genre – sexy, intelligent and fast-paced with well-drawn, interesting characters and storylines that sometimes feel as though they’re taken from tomorrow’s headlines! The first book – Concrete Evidence – is one of the few books in the series I haven’t read, and I’d intended to listen to the audio at some point, but after BJ reviewed it back in 2014 and said that the narration wasn’t very good, I instead put the book on the TBR pile of doom.

Unfortunately, the book is still there – so I was delighted when I saw a newly recorded audiobook version crop up at Audible, narrated by Nicol Zanzarella – who has narrated all the other Evidence books – and Greg Tremblay (whose work on the author’s Flashpoint series sent me down a Tremblay/Boudreaux shaped rabbit hole I still haven’t emerged from!). For anyone wondering, the author’s website indicates that she has made a few small revisions and added an epilogue previously only available as bonus material.

Concrete Evidence is, I believe, Rachel Grant’s first published work, and although it contains many of the things I’ve come to regard as hallmarks of her novels – intriguing, suspenseful storylines, ballsy heroines, sexy heroes and steamy love scenes – it isn’t quite as polished or tight-knit as her more recent work. It’s overlong and a bit dated in places, and the plot is overly complicated, with so many moving parts that there were times I found it hard to follow.

Around a year before the story proper begins, underwater archaeologist Erica Kessling learns that not only had her recently deceased mother run up debts to the tune of one hundred thousand dollars, but that she’d committed identity theft and run them up in Erica’s name. Desperate for money, Erica dropped out of her PhD program and took a job excavating a shipwreck off the Mexican coast, persuaded to join the team by the assurances she was given that everything was above board. But after she discovered a cache of incredible Aztec artefacts and realised that her boss – Jake Novak – intended to sell them on the black market, she was furious and really worried about potential damage to her career (working with a treasure hunter is the kiss of death for an archaeologist.) Erica decided to alert the authorities to what was going on; she took the artefacts, swam ashore with them and hid them – but she was caught, and forced – under threat of extreme violence and rape – to give up the treasure. She got away with her life, but her professional reputation has suffered; Novak is slowly making good on his threat to destroy her career completely, and she has had to move half-way across the US in order to find work. She’s now employed by Talon & Drake, an engineering company in Washington DC that is run by JT Talon – the son of its owner, a US senator of Native American descent who is about to announce his bid for the presidency.

Erica has just been given a project she’s wanted to work on for ages – but that good news is tempered by some that is not so good; she’s being saddled with an intern for a few weeks, a twenty-five-year-old grad student who happens to be a friend of the Talon family. When Lee Scott arrives, Erica can’t help but notice he’s gorgeous, but he’s also spoiled, lazy and seems to have very little interest in anything other than his ongoing game of Tetris.

But Lee isn’t at all what he’s making out to be. He’s a friend of the family, yes – in fact, he’s the former stepbrother of JT (and older than twenty-five!) – but he’s actually an elite cyber security specialist and has been asked by JT to investigate rumours that someone within the company is involved in artefact smuggling out of Iraq. Lee’s job is to unmask the smugglers and find out who killed JT’s informant – all on the downlow, as any whiff of scandal could prove fatal to Senator Talon’s presidential hopes.

Meanwhile Erica is trying to bite back her frustration at being stuck with Lee (and at the same time determined to ignore her attraction to him), carry out an environmental assessment on a 1950s house built on an Indian reservation that may be eligible for listing in the Register for Historic Places, AND find a way to clear her name – which means finding out who bought the Aztec artefacts and using that information to prove who actually committed the crime, and thus her own innocence.

Throw in some tribal politics, an unsolved murder from the 1950s and the continued threat to Erica’s life (and livelihood) from Novak, and you’ve got an entertaining, meaty tale of intrigue and suspense with twists and turns a-plenty. There’s romance, too – although the degree to which it works for you will likely depend on your tolerance for deception; Lee has to keep his identity and purpose a secret from Erica and does so for longer than I’d have liked, and Erica – not surprisingly – doesn’t tell Lee the truth about her situation; and because he’s looked into her background and recognises when she’s lying, it only serves to increase his suspicion that she’s likely involved in the smuggling ring. But even though she’s his number one suspect, Lee can’t help falling for her, and although Erica is more cautious and fights her attraction every step of the way, she can’t fight their sizzling chemistry forever.

I enjoyed the listen overall, although there were a few things that didn’t really work for me. As I’ve said, the plot is perhaps a little too busy, and there were couple of times when Erica veered dangerously close to TSTL territory that made me roll my eyes. The mental lusting is a bit overdone, and there’s a lot of repetition in internal monologues – from Lee about how he’s lying to Erica, and from Erica about how she shouldn’t want Lee.

As a début romantic suspense novel, Concrete Evidence has a lot going for it – strong characters, steamy, well-written sex scenes, and a clever, well-researched plot in which the author’s background knowledge comes through loud and clear. And then, of course, there’s a pair of excellent performances from Greg Tremblay and Nicol Zanzarella to add into the mix, and their intelligent and engaged narration really drew me into the story and kept me engaged throughout. I’ve sung Mr. Tremblay’s praises here so many times, that it will come as no surprise when I do it again; he portrays Lee using just the right combination of insouciant, sexy and badass and clearly and expertly differentiates between a fairly large number of male characters without breaking a sweat. Ms. Zanzarella’s interpretation of Erica is spot on; the character’s determination, desperation and vulnerability are all clearly audible in her voice, and she really delivers when it comes to the emotional content of the story. The one niggle I have – and it’s more of a “thing I noticed” than a real criticism – is that she can’t quite find enough different voices for the male characters, so some of them sound a bit similar and a couple of times I struggled to work out who was speaking. It happened rarely however, and I was usually able to work it out fairly quickly. But overall, the dual narration works really well here and I was delighted to learn that the next book in the Evidence series (out in October) will also benefit from the Tremblay/Zanzarella double-act, so – yay!

Concrete Evidence is a swiftly moving, well-plotted and sexy romantic suspense story that boasts terrific performances from two of the best narrators around. It may not be my favourite book in the series (my heart still belongs to Dmitri from Poison Evidence!), but it’s definitely worth a listen.

Caz

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