Diamond Ring by KD Casey

Narrated by Alexander Cendese

Diamond Ring, the third (and final?) book in KD Casey’s Unwritten Rules series of baseball-themed romances, is an emotional friends-to-lovers/second chance romance spanning a decade. It’s a quiet story featuring two very different, well-written characters whose love story is derailed when one of them is injured and finds himself living a different life to the one he’d envisaged.

Although the couples from the other books make cameo appearances, I believe the books can be read in any order, and this one certainly works as a standalone.

Catcher Alex Angelides (pronounced “angle-ee-dees”) is called up to play for the Oakland Elephants on the same day as rising star pitcher Jake Fischer. They’re very different personalities – Alex is prickly and reserved where Jake is good-natured and enthusiastic about, well, everything, and Alex is surprised when Jake makes a point of including him in the interview he’s doing in the locker room. Jake is obviously a bit more media savvy than Alex, whose responses mostly consist of one-word answers, and Alex can’t help but wonder why Jake dragged him in to it and didn’t hog the limelight for himself. Especially as Alex knows all too well that in baseball, “pitchers get all the glory, catchers do all the work.”

But Jake seems set on making a friend of him, and as the days and weeks pass, that’s what happens. As their working partnership develops, so does a strong friendship which is underpinned by a strong current of attraction neither is ready to act on. Their first season goes well… until it doesn’t, and a missed play in the Fall Classic leads to losing the game and the championship, and to harsh words and the makings of an estrangement.

When the season ends, Jake returns home and has surgery to repair a torn ligament in his elbow, which means he’s going to be out of action for best part of the following season. Unfortunately, however, his recovery and rehab don’t go as well as hoped – some players make a full recovery from this injury and some don’t – and Jake is released from his contract and spends the next decade bouncing around minor league teams until he receives a call from the Elephants asking him to come back and play another season for them. He knows that for them, he’s only a last minute signing to fill a gap in the roster – and that for him, it was Oakland or nowhere. He knows that Alex is returning to Oakland this season, too. What he doesn’t know is he should feel about that.

Alex has had a pretty good career, but has more or less decided that this season will be his last. He had no idea, when he agreed to return to the Elephants, that Jake Fischer would be going back, too – if he had, he’d have gone somewhere (anywhere) else, but it’s too late to back out now. He and Jake are grown-ups and can act like it – except that in spite of the intervening ten years, the reasons that led to the collapse of their friendship – arguments over how that fateful series ended, how Jake’s arm got injured and their unresolved feelings of guilt, anger and frustration – are constantly bubbling close to the surface and are impossible to avoid. Paired as catcher and pitcher again, they’re going to have to find a way to talk to each other and work together for the sake of the team, even if their friendship is destined to remain a thing of the past.

But as they slowly rediscover their ability to communicate on the field, they begin to rediscover it off the field as well, slowly re-learning each other and starting to let go of ten years worth of anger and resentment. This, for me, is the best part of any second chance romance, the protagonists finding out who they are now and falling in love with that person rather than just hanging on to the memory of who they used to be. KD Casey nails that aspect of the story in a beautifully written and bittersweet romance, full of longing and deep affection.

I liked that Jake and Alex are not ‘superstar’ athletes, as so many in sports romances are. They work hard to be the best they can be, but Jake’s career is blighted by injury and for Alex, playing ball has always been more about being able to provide for his family than any great passion for the game. Of the two of them, Jake’s story is particularly poignant as he deals with the disappointment of a failed career while continuing to play the game he loves and living with an anxiety disorder and depression. His issues are never underplayed or ignored and he shows admirable resilience, both in continuing to play and in putting in the work, day in, day out, to maintain his mental health. I appreciated that we’re shown that Jake’s medication can affect both his appetite and his sex drive, and the emphasis placed on the importance of having a patient and understanding partner who is happy to find imaginative and fun ways to spend their ‘alone time’. Men in romances – whether m/m or m/f – are so often written as studs who can go all night so it’s refreshing to find one who isn’t and to find the situation dealt with honestly and sensitively.

I liked that (roughly) the first thirty percent of the book is devoted to the ‘first time’ romance between Jake and Alex, so we get to see them becoming friends and falling in love as well as what led to their break-up, which makes their rekindled romance that much easier to buy into and root for. The downside, however, is that we learn very little of what happened to either of them in the intervening years. Jake has been through a lot, of course, but I’m not sure that completely accounts for why he feels like a different character in the second part of the story, and all we learn about Alex is that he had a long term boyfriend for about three years he has recently split from. And my other criticism is one I’ve had about the other books in the series – and which I fully accept is a ‘me’ thing rather than a ‘book’ thing – but there’s too much baseball minutiae here for my taste. For those of us who enjoy sports romance without necessarily knowing all that much about sport, this can become dull and repetitive, but most importantly, means that we may not understand what’s at stake for the characters. I honestly didn’t realise that the game that causes the rift between Alex and Jake was the final of the World Series, and all the detail about the games and stats of their final season together went completely over my head, so I didn’t realise how amazing their eventual victory really was.

Alexander Cendese is someone I’ve listened to quite a bit – although this is actually the first time I’ve heard him narrate a book solo. He’s an animated, expressive performer and I enjoy that – he’s good at conveying humour and emotion, and is equally good in the quieter, more introspective moments that come along in this story as Jake ponders how many times he can allow himself to re-make his bed or Alex contemplates his future. Having listened to other sports romances he’s narrated, I know he has a great line in loud, grouchy coach-types, and he voices the supporting cast appropriately and skilfully, using a variety of tone and timbre. If I have a complaint, it’s that sometimes his differentiation between the two leads isn’t that great; I think he opts to pitch Jake a little lower than Alex most of the time, but I was never quite sure – in scenes where it’s just them, there’s enough in his voice and/or dialogue tags to make it clear who is speaking, but in group scenes or when it’s just one of them with other characters, it’s not always immediately apparent which of them is involved.

Despite my feeling a bit overwhelmed by all the baseball, I enjoyed both story and narration in Diamond Ring. It’s a well-written, deeply emotional and heartfelt story about dreams not realised, persevering in the face of adversity, and love lost and found. The HEA is well-earned, and the performance by Alexander Cendese is excellent. Recommended.

Caz

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Buy Diamond Ring by KD Casey on Amazon