Story Rating: 2.5 stars
Audio Rating: 3 stars

Narrator: Iggy Thoma and Alexander Cendese
Length: 8 hours, 28 minutes

Audiobook Buy Links: Amazon/Audible | iBooks
Book Buy Links: Amazon | iBooks

Everett has had a rough year with his husband dying and now he’s been asked to come back to the small town where his grandfather, Henry, lives after Henry fell and broke his leg. Everett hasn’t spoken to his grandfather in years; he knows Henry doesn’t approve of Everett being gay, but the guilt from Everett’s mother is strong, so he rearranges his life for a few months.

When Everett gets into an accident on his way into town, he meets police officer, Silas Sloane. Silas has lived in O’Leary his entire life and, while he doesn’t like the residents all up in his business, the town is home. Silas is fine with life and has no interest in commitments until he lays eyes on Everett.

The attraction between the men is clear, but Everett doesn’t know how to move on and Silas doesn’t even know where to begin a relationship. When strange occurrences and danger come to town, Silas and Everett will have to keep each other safe and hold on before their new relationship is over before it starts…permanently.

From the start, this book didn’t work for me. While Everett and Silas are said to be falling for each other, I never could fall for either of them, the many secondary characters throughout the book, or the small town in which this story is set.

Everett arrives in town to help his grandfather, who he hasn’t spoken to in years. He is able to rent out his home and obtain a short-term job in town within moments. Everett meets Silas as soon as he arrives in town when he witnesses a strange occurrence. The occurrence then gets worked into the rest of the story, but not well.

Everett doesn’t know how to move on since his husband died and Silas never wanted a serious commitment and I didn’t really particularly like either of their stories. There are a lot of characters in town and, at one point, Silas lists a bunch of them by first and last name and I felt they might have been connected to another series and the list-like delivery of names didn’t fit in here.

Everett’s grandfather, Henry, is grumpy and cranky and not the in the cute way. Everett thinks that Henry has never approved of him and hasn’t spoken to him in years, yet he uproots his entire life to help Henry and puts up with the man seemingly being ungrateful. It’s then the push-pull of Everett and Silas being attracted to each other and then pulling back from each other and really not understanding each other at all and I did not see the appeal. The townspeople, as expected, are a bunch of gossipy busy bodies, and I found them more annoying than endearing. The “mystery,” and I use the term loosely, of a missing person did not add anything to the story for me. Silas’ police work is only seen in small snippets and it didn’t seem like he was really doing anything to figure it out and a lot was brushed aside. The ending of this plotline then didn’t come together for me, either. I’m going to go with the feeling that this author is not for me.

The book is dual narrated by Iggy Toma and Alexander Cendese. While Cendese is a new narrator to me, I have listened to Toma previously, but these performances didn’t work out that well for me. Toma narrated the chapters from Everett’s POV and Cendese narrated the chapters from Silas’ POV and their voices were too distinct and too different for this to flow well. The narrators both voiced Silas and Everett in their basic narrator tone with little difference between the two characters. Then, when the narrator changed, both characters sounded completely different, which made it hard to keep any type of continuity for me. Yet, they both gave different voices to the side characters. The older residents of the town sounded as expected and many of the men had a shouting quality. The women were difficult to listen to and they all had a cartoonish, syrupy tone and I wondered if this is what both narrators think women sound like. Although I might try each narrator separately another time, the dual narrator here did not enhance this book for me at all.