Reviewed by Alexander

TITLE: Ball & Chain 

SERIES:  Cut & Run

AUTHOR:  Abigail Roux

PUBLISHER:  Riptide Publishing

LENGTH: 10 hours

NARRATOR: J.F. Harding

BLURB:

Home from their unexpected deployment, the former members of Marine Force Recon team Sidewinder rejoin their loved ones and try to pick up the pieces of the lives they were forced to leave behind. Ty Grady comes home to Zane Garrett, only to find that everything around him has changed – even the men he went to war with. He barely has time to adjust before his brother, Deuce, asks Ty to be his best man. But that isn’t all Deuce asks Ty to do, and Ty must call for backup to deal with the business issues of Deuce’s future father-in-law.

Nick O’Flaherty and Kelly Abbott join Ty and Zane at the wedding on an island in Scotland, thinking they’re there to assuage Deuce’s paranoia. But when bodies start dropping and boats start sinking, the four men get more involved with the festivities than they’d ever planned to. With the clock ticking and the killer just as stuck on the isolated island as they are, Ty and Zane must navigate a veritable minefield of family, friends, and foes to stop the whole island from being destroyed.

REVIEW:

Ball & Chain is the eighth book in the Cut & Run series and the story builds on situations from the previous books.  As such, reading any of the stories out of order is not recommended, this one included, simply due to the continuously evolving relationships and situations.

It may seem strange, but one of the things that I liked about Ball & Chain was the infighting, anger, and the character’s helplessness.  We are so used to Ty, Zane, Nick, and Kelly being able to overcome any and all obstacles, but here, we see a more human side to our friends from Sidewinder.  Trapped on an island, searching for a potential kidnapper, concerned about who will be the next victim of a brutal murderer, the guys are at a loss and Ty and Nick end up at each other’s throats.

Here we have guys with whom we have shared many adventures truly showing a complexity and depth that in my opinion wasn’t present in the previous books.  Nick has to have been the one that exhibited the most growth, especially with his fledgling relationship with Kelly, anger towards Ty, and stress from his estranged father’s illness.  Too often we see a character deal with these kinds of stressors in polar opposite ways, but in Ball & Chain, we see Nick, and the other characters behave in a realistic way, which helped me to empathize and try to figure out how I would react Ina similar situation.

For a novel full of violence, gore, anger, and frustration, I actually found many reason to laugh, the dialogue was witty and clever, and this helped balance out the negative events that transpired.  The setting was cool, I mean Scotland on a private island?  Please, sign me up (without the murders, please!).  I mean, in a contemporary setting, an author has minimal world building to play with and yet Roux took me around the island, through the castle, and down those creepy as (insert expletive) tunnels.

Harding keeps getting better and better as the series continues and although he wasn’t a favorite narrator of mine a few years back, that sure has changed.  The vocal characterizations were great, the pace and emotion just right, and the overall production quality exactly what I would expect from a top-notch performer.

STORY RATING: 

AUDIO RATING: 

BUY LINKS: 

Audible  

Amazon