Title: Survivor
Series: Survivor: Book One
Author: T.M. Smith
Narrator: Nick J. Russo
Publisher: Self-Published
Run Time: 5 hours and 33 minutes
Category: Contemporary
At a Glance: While I expected there to be a bit more suspense and illustrations of Taylor’s struggle with his parents’ murder, since the reader is with him as he ages, on the whole, Survivor is a sweet romance that highlights the best in human giving and familial love—a tone and theme that is captured and expressed well by Nick J. Russo.
Reviewed By: Jovan
Blurb: Taylor Langford’s world is torn apart when he is only 13 years old – his parents killed, leaving him alone and orphaned. With no living relatives, he’d certainly be another statistic if not for the intervention of the policeman who found Taylor in the crawl space where his mother hid him that fateful night. Despite the tragedy and resulting anguish in his life, Taylor knows how lucky he is.
Frank Moore is a rookie with the Dallas Police Department when he and his partner answer a call in Devonshire, one of the city’s more affluent neighborhoods. They think the young boy in various pictures throughout the home has been kidnapped until they find him, shaken but alive. Officer Moore recognizes the pain in the kid’s eyes, having lost his own mother to cancer when he was just a boy. He steps in, making sure Taylor is placed with a loving foster family. Over the years, Frank becomes a permanent fixture in Taylor’s life.
A decade later, the case remains unsolved and the once gangly, uncertain teenager is now a college graduate who knows exactly what he wants. He’s coming home to the man that helped mold and shape his life, the man he’s loved for as long as he can remember, Frank Moore. But Taylor isn’t the only person returning to Dallas, and while Frank is distracted by his own conflicting feelings and the new bond growing between the two, the past creeps up on them, determined to finish what was started 10 years earlier.
Review: From the day rookie officer Frank Moore finds Taylor Langford in a hidden crawlspace in the attic, their lives and futures are entwined. Horrified by the gruesome murders that left Taylor an orphan, Frank makes sure to find him a good foster family and spends the next decade as a constant presence in Taylor’s life. As Taylor grows from a scared, confused and angry thirteen-year-old into a confident, accomplished twenty-three-year-old man, Frank’s role in his life evolves from guardian angel and confidant to the man Taylor can’t get out of his mind and to whom he compares all other men.
In the intervening years, Taylor’s adoptive family, Frank, Frank’s father, and Frank’s partner on the force, Caleb, and his wife spend summers together on the beach and create a new family and support system for Taylor. During the summer after Taylor’s high school graduation, Frank is faced with the discomfiting and unsettling awareness of Taylor as an attractive male. Having been a part of Taylor’s life as a friend and almost a surrogate uncle, his attraction to Taylor strikes him as wrong and misplaced. However, as Frank grows to admire the strength, intelligence and compassion of the man Taylor is becoming, he is forced to recognize that his feelings have only grown as Taylor has become an independent, capable adult.
For me, Survivor is one of those interesting stories in which the individual elements that usually make a great story—relatable/interesting characters, character development, decent supportive cast and a compelling blurb—are all present, but there is just something missing from the final product that takes the book from possibly being great to good. The book is structured to follow Taylor as he grows up and the evolution of his relationship to and with Frank, by using his summers in Martha’s vineyards until Taylor is twenty-three. While, this was done to help foster character growth and show the reader how Taylor and Frank changed, it does hamper the pacing somewhat. There is a bit of the inevitable redundancy that even Nick J. Russo’s talent can’t overcome.
Also, while there is evidence that Taylor struggles with his parents murder as an adult, and there is mention of him having issues when he was younger, the reader doesn’t get to see it. We get to see him happy on the beach and doing age-appropriate things, and family bonding, and growing more handsome over the years, but none of the real emotion that his situation entails happens until he is older, and it is mentioned as a part of his on-going adult struggle. For me, this created a separation between the character and his experience so that when the reader sees Taylor plagued by nightmares and learns he is medicated, it was almost a shock. It seemed tacked on to give him more depth instead of it being conveyed organically during the years we see him grow up, which contributed to the sense of “missed opportunity” I have about the book.
Additionally, I felt that Taylor was originally written to be younger to create a larger May/December age-gap than ten years, because of how he is presented and his dialogue at that age during a flashback that was a bit jarring. It almost felt like TM Smith decided having Frank so closely involved with Taylor and looking at him in a sexual way at eighteen might not have played as well if Frank had been substantially older. On the whole, Survivor is a romance book-ended by a suspense plot. It introduces you to Frank and the murder mystery, and then that plotline basically falls away until it ramps back up in the end. That being said, there was much to like about the story that was enhanced by Russo’s performance.
With Frank’s constant presence during Taylor’s development into a man, I think TM Smith did a great job handling how each man’s feelings changed and how it would affect their outlook about themselves and their behavior. The family unit created for Taylor was heartwarming, and Russo does an excellent job of infusing the characters’ interactions with all the joy, love, fun and affection they have for one another. I agree with Smith’s decision to include other lovers for the MCs, and Russo handles not only the passion but the conflict both Taylor and Frank experience afterwards when, inevitably, their thoughts return to the man who has captured their attention and heart very well. Moreover, I enjoyed the fact that although Taylor is younger, he possesses an extremely confident and assertive personality that clearly demonstrates he is Frank’s equal. Although Taylor could be a bit over the top in his possessiveness, Russo’s voice work keeps him from coming across too much as an alpha a-hole in these moments. While I expected there to be a bit more suspense and illustrations of Taylor’s struggle with his parents’ murder, since the reader is with him as he ages, on the whole, Survivor is a sweet romance that highlights the best in human giving and familial love—a tone and theme that is captured and expressed well by Nick J. Russo.
You can buy Survivor here:
[zilla_button url=”https://www.audible.com/pd/Survivor-Audiobook/B079C24B8R?qid=1536945829&sr=sr_1_1&ref=a_search_c3_lProduct_1_1&pf_rd_p=e81b7c27-6880-467a-b5a7-13cef5d729fe&pf_rd_r=B5GFD7W4WYGK7QBJYSGV&” style=”blue” size=”medium” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Audible [/zilla_button][zilla_button url=”https://geo.itunes.apple.com/us/audiobook/survivor-unabridged/id1342231041?mt=3″ style=”blue” size=”medium” type=”round” target=”_blank”] iTunes [/zilla_button][zilla_button url=”http://authl.it/B079C1HY62?d” style=”blue” size=”medium” type=”round” target=”_blank”] Amazon [/zilla_button]
