Narrated by Stephen Borne
I’ve enjoyed listening to the five previous books in Rebecca Zanetti’s Deep Ops series of romantic suspense novels, so when I saw there was a sixth book on the way, I made a note to look for the audio. I was pleased to see there was going to be one, although sad to see that Roger Wayne wouldn’t be narrating it. He did such a great job in the other books and I knew he’d be a tough act to follow; his replacement, Stephen Borne, isn’t someone I’ve listened to before, but I’ve seen his name around quite a lot and Audible shows he has well over a hundred titles to his credit, mostly in romance and romantic suspense, so I thought I’d be in a safe pair of hands as far as the narration was concerned.
In my review of the previous book, Unforgiven, I made a comment as an aside that “I certainly wouldn’t mind more of Scott the hot lawyer” – and lo and behold, here he is! A former marine, Scott Terentsen now deals with bad guys through the courts, and in the previous book, he was shot when helping out the Deep Ops team on one of their operations. While he’s recovered physically, he’s still a bit of a mess on the inside and has been on autopilot ever since; his work keeps his mind agile, but he’s lost interest in it and just goes through the motions.
Millicent Frost has appeared in some of the previous books as a secondary character who has sometimes worked with the Deep Ops team. Her speciality is gadgetry – she’s often referred to as their version of James Bond’s “Q” – and when we meet her again here, she’s working undercover as an air conditioning engineer, planting surveillance equipment in the office of high-powered investment banker Werner Dearth. The same investment banker with whom Scott has an appointment. Millie is the last person he expects to see there, but he doesn’t blow her cover; after his meeting with the deeply unpleasant Dearth, he waits for Millie outside and then insists on driving her home while questioning her about what she was doing in that particular office. She can’t tell him anything – and unfortunately, their association creates a serious problem for the HDD a couple of months down the line when, during his divorce hearing, Dearth alleges that Millie and Scott were conspiring against him, which exposes the HDD’s investigation into his activities.
Millie is already on shaky ground with the HDD, and this could get her fired. But before she can worry about that too much, she gets a call from her brother, JT, telling her that their Aunt Mae – who brought them up – has had a heart attack. All Millie wants to do is get home to River City to be with Mae – but before she can make her way out of the courthouse, Dearth grabs her and threatens her: “I take out my enemies and you just became one. You won’t see me coming.”
The next time we see her, Millie is waking up in a room not her own, her head pounding, her mind groggy and her body naked. She looks down at herself to see blood on her chest – and then notices the man in her bed, an ex she hasn’t seen for years, together with a fishing knife of her own making, both of them covered in blood. The man is definitely dead and Millie has no idea of what is going on. She doesn’t remember coming home with him or getting into bed with him – she doesn’t remember anything of the previous day after she left Mae’s bedside at the hospital. The only thing she IS certain of is that she didn’t kill anyone.
Scott is surprised when he gets a call from the chief of police in Shalebrook County and even moreso when he learns that Millie is suspected of murder. Scott – accompanied by Roscoe (he’s dog sitting for Angus and Nari while they’re away in Europe) – drops everything and makes his way to the small town of River City to do whatever he can to help Millie to clear her name.
Frostbitten gets off to a great start, quickly bringing Scott and Millie back into each other’s orbits and setting up the mystery, but the story is nothing we haven’t seen/heard/read before, and the author doesn’t do anything to freshen up a very tired trope. Millie’s being this crazy-smart inventor-type is woefully underused – we never see her inventing anything new or having to cobble something together on the fly to get them out of a tricky situation, and honestly, she’s kinda dull. And for a supposedly intelligent guy, Scott does some really dumb stuff. Right at the beginning when he corners Millie outside the investment bank, he insists she gets into his car or he’ll make a scene. Seriously? A grown man and tough lawyer and he’ll make a scene if she doesn’t do as he says? And he never thought they might be caught on camera before they get inside? (Which is exactly what happens and tanks the HDD’s case.)
The story is overlong and overly busy, and the chemistry between Scott and Millie is barely lukewarm, so the romance falls completely flat. There’s no growth for either character (Scott still has largely untreated PTSD by the end) and apart from a late-book appearance from Wolfe, the Deep Ops team is largely absent which, as their camaraderie and interactions are some of the things that made the previous books so entertaining, left a really big hole. And the ending… no spoilers, but it made no sense.
Sadly, I can’t say that the narration helped make listening to Frostbitten less of a chore. Stephen Borne has a naturally deep voice with an attractive huskiness to it that is a good fit for the romantic suspense genre, but there’s a kind of monotonous quality to his performance that often had me zoning out and having to rewind. I checked to see if any of the Gals have reviewed him before – and while I agree with Kaetrin’s observation about his ability to differentiate well between male and female characters, the problem is that there’s a fairly large secondary cast here, and almost all the men sound the same, as do almost all the women. And he reads Scott’s dialogue in his ‘narrator voice’ so that it’s sometimes hard to tell if Scott is speaking or if Mr. Borne is reading a narrative passage. I doubt I’ll be rushing to listen to him again.
If this is the final book in the Deep Ops series, I’m afraid that Frostbitten ends it with a whimper rather than a bang, and I’m going to pretend the series ended with book five.
Caz
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