Narrated by Sawyer Allerde
A Vintage Review – audiobook released 2010, review written 2018
Book two in the Cut & Run series, Sticks & Stones is a slightly different animal to the previous book but was no less enjoyable. While our heroes have to face a number of suitably dangerous – and potentially life-threatening – situations, the storyline here is more character focused and the whole thing feels less ‘flabby’ than book one.
After a traumatic case from which they barely emerged with their lives, FBI agents Ty Grady and Zane Garrett are temporarily suspended from field work while they recover – physically and mentally. But things aren’t going as well as they should, and Zane, in particular, is likely to fail his psychiatric evaluation, meaning his FBI career is in the balance. Ty – who is like a kid on a sugar high at the best of times – is bouncing off the walls and eager to get back to work, so an enforced vacation isn’t exactly high on his wish list, but when his boss suggests – strongly – that he goes home to visit his family in West Virginia, and also makes clear he expects him to take Zane with him in order to try to help him sort himself out – Ty realises what’s at stake and wants to help.
The plan is that Ty, his father, Earl (who is also ex-military and a good friend of Ty’s boss, Richard Burns), and his brother, Deuce – who happens to be a psychiatrist – are going to hike a trail through the mountains for a few days, but… well, this is Ty and Zane, so of course things go wrong and they find themselves off-route and end up stumbling across a group of treasure hunters who are determined, at any cost, to keep people out of the way.
There are a number of holes and loose ends in the plot, but as I realised in Cut & Run, which suffers from the same thing – as well as being overly long – it’s the characters that are the key to these books. The plots are… not incidental exactly, but are secondary to the character and relationship development, and I suspect it’s that which is going to keep me coming back to them. Here, we get to meet Ty’s family – who are almost as crazy as he is! – and the authors do a great job with the family dynamics. It’s clear that Ty has a difficult relationship with his father, who he looks up to but who is very exacting; and who doesn’t seem to think much of Zane. (Of course, they can’t acknowledge their relationship – such as it is – publicly at this point; Deuce knows they’re sleeping together, but he’s the only one apart from Ty and Zane who does.) Ty and Zane are still struggling to work out what they are to each other; things seem to have cooled off a bit between them at the beginning of the book, but neither is ready to own up to how they feel and even less, admit it to the other. The authors do a great job exploring the dynamics of Ty and Zane’s relationship, their fears, insecurities and reservations and the lorry-load of emotional baggage they’re both carrying; Zane is a recovering addict still carrying a load of guilt over the death of his wife; Ty is a former marine who suffers PTSD and flashbacks, and both are great at hiding their true feelings and not saying what they mean. Even so, it’s clear to the listener just how much they mean to one another, and I admit that Ty’s little moment of clarity in the latter part of the story made me sigh, just a bit. They ground each other and centre each other; I loved Deuce’s evaluation at the end, that even though their working relationship is disorganised and antagonistic, they’re also fiercely loyal and not fit to be partnered with anyone else.
Sawyer Allerde returns to narrate this instalment and I had much the same issues with his performance here as I did in Cut & Run. There’s a lack of emotionality to his delivery, his pacing is a little fast at times and his female voices are pretty poor (luckily, the only female character with more than a line or two is Ty’s mum), but on the positive side, he does differentiate well between the various male characters, so it’s never a problem to discern who is speaking when there are more than two characters in any given scene, and I generally like the way he voices the two principals, even though I think Zane’s voice (he’s a hulking six-foot-five, after all) should have been pitched a little lower.
I suspect I became accustomed to his delivery the more I listened, and as with the last book, the issues I had didn’t ruin it. But I’ve just started listening to book three, Fish & Chips, narrated by Sean Crisden, and OMG, the difference is startling. I can’t help thinking what a great job he’d have done with the first two books.
That said, I enjoyed Sticks & Stones and will be continuing to listen to the series. Ty and Zane are terrific characters, their bickering and banter is wonderful and even when the writing and/or plotting and/or narration leaves something to be desired, they shine.
Caz
Buy Sticks & Stones by Madeleine Urban and Abigail Roux on Amazon
