Reviewed by Alexander

TITLE: New York Christmas

AUTHOR: RJ Scott

PUBLISHER: Love Lane Books

LENGTH: 3 hours, 28 minutes

NARRATOR: Sean Crisden

BLURB:

Can a New York cop and a teacher find love in the city at Christmas?

It’s been far too long since Christian Matthews has seen Daniel Bailey. In fact, the last time they met, Chris was a senior in college and he was the TA tasked with helping Daniel who was a way too confident freshman.

Seven years down the road, Chris is licking his wounds after being asked to leave the private school where he was teaching. He has no job, no money, and has to rely on his friend, Amelia, for the job and a room to live in. He needs a freaking Christmas miracle to make this season anything other than a total loss.

Then Daniel comes back into his life, and suddenly everything seems possible. Not only is Daniel still the man Christian wants more than anything, but this time Chris may well actually tell Daniel how he feels.

REVIEW:

As I would have expected, New York Christmas is a sweet, feel good story.  Add in the elements of unrequited love (lust, I mean they were college students), persecution, law enforcement, and of course some spectacular muffins, and you have a winner.

The story is set around Christmas, but does not delve into that aspect, and honestly, I didn’t even notice, the story and characters, Chris and Daniel were easy to like.  Amelia is a saint, there is no other way to describe her and her relationship with Chris, heck, Daniel is pretty high up there himself, but in his case, love makes people do things they would not normally do.  If I had to pick a favorite character, Daniel would be it, both for how he was written, his occupation (he sounds like he fils out that NYPD uniform quite nicely), and also for his voice in the narration.

The storyline is relatively complex, incorporating various points of conflict, and keeping us, the reader (or listener, as the case may be) interested, and empathizing for both Chris and Daniel.  Chris has the most on his plate, that’s for sure, but as the saying goes, “shit splatters” and that is where Daniel becomes burdened with some hard decisions.  Smoothly plotted and executed, New York Christmas had just a few plot points that were just slightly beyond belief, but overall was realistic enough for my liking.

Crisden is a solid narrator, and his Daniel was excellent, perfectly suited to the big cop.  Chris’ voice was a bit, how do I say it, crackly?  It’s a bit hard to describe, but at times, I visualized Chris as being an old man the was his character spoke.  Overall, Crisden does solid (yup, that word again) male voices.  Crisden’s female voices are okay, and I say okay because although Amelia, being the critical secondary character, is identifiable as female by voice, there is something about her pitch that makes me think of a man doing a woman’s voice which is in fact the case, but does pull me out of the story just a bit.

I now have a new audiobook on my permanent re-listen rotation, I loved the story, and regardless of the minor issues I had with the characterizations, Crisden is always a pleasure to listen to.

STORY RATING:

AUDIO RATINGE:

BUY LINKS: 

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