Title: No Tears for Darcy
Author: Vicki Reese
Narrator: Brock Hatton
Publisher: Dreamspinner Press
Run Time: 6 hours and 28 minutes
Category: Contemporary, Mystery/Suspense
At a Glance: Brock Hatton does what he can with this plot, and believably conveys a former FBI agent being fully bamboozled by the friends and townies he calls close friends.
Reviewed By: Mike
Blurb: Letting love pass them by would be a crime.
Former forensic accountant Cameron has lost nearly everyone he’s ever loved, and now his vintage clothing shop has been broken into and trashed. When town Police Chief Will Carson asks an out-of-town cop friend of his for help, Cam takes one look at the dark-haired, blue-eyed detective and knows he’s in real trouble – and it has nothing to do with vandalism or murder.
Pete Minchelli is on leave from his job in Philadelphia due to a gunshot wound, but he figures he can help an academy buddy with some light police work. Plus, he’ll have a chance to experience small-town life. He’s tired of the big city and all its corruption. But he quickly discovers that not all the bad stuff happens in cities. What he doesn’t expect to find is death, treachery – or love.
Review: Cameron is a lot of ‘former’ things. He is a former forensic accountant for the FBI, a former son to his late mother, who’s curiosity shop he now owns and operates, and he’s the former lover of man who died under mysterious circumstances in a small town populated by the kind of characters worthy of a suburb of Twin Peaks.
Pete Minchelli is a cop in a big city not far from Cameron’s hometown. He’s in recovery from an injury during an accident on a case that went sideways. He has a loud (read: hackneyed) Italian family, and Pete and his brother own a new restaurant-cum-nightclub in our harried little burg.
Brock Hatton does what he can with this plot, and believably conveys a former FBI agent being fully bamboozled by the friends and townies he calls close friends. The ‘Darcy’ in the title is Cameron’s closest and oldest friend. The amount of betrayal she is capable of committing on Cameron should be legendary. Though this book is medium length, there is a lot of material here. There are also plot points that are hammered on yet went unexplained by the end, or are just plain forgotten, but Hatton keeps pulling us back into the story despite its construction flaws, as only a talented voice actor can. As the plot layers one more twist upon another, Hatton not only keeps up but keeps the listener in the loop of changes that seemingly have no point, and he has a talent for making us care for the minor characters as well. Hatton is a new voice for me, but he seems to have a very good handle on the Massachusetts accent that the entire Minchelli family shares. Some narrators would have phoned in their performances, but Hatton keeps us involved because he makes Cameron so believable, even when his actions are the complete opposite of what a trained FBI agent’s should be.
Buy this book if you’re looking for a potboiler. Buy it if you want to try out a new voice actor. But this is just an ordinary plot that could have used a lot more work to make it tighter.
You can buy No Tears for Darcy here:
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