Reviewed by Annika
TITLE: Unwritten Law 
SERIES: Steele Brothers #1
AUTHOR: Eden Finley
NARRATOR: Joel Leslie & Antony Ferguson
PUBLISHER: Tantor
RELEASE DATE: December 18, 2018
LENGTH: 5 hours, 45 minutes
BLURB:
Being an identical twin doesn’t come without issues.
No one can tell us apart, not even our parents sometimes. We don’t usually use that to our advantage, but it comes in handy when my brother needs help breaking up with his boyfriends—which happens more than I’d care to admit. I know it’s enabling him, but I can’t say no to Anders. I will do anything for my twin. The breakups always go the same; they’re swift and simple.
Until Reed.
He’s everything I’ve fantasised about but never allowed myself to have. When I give in to temptation and begin to freak out, it’s not because he’s a guy. It’s because he thinks I’m my brother, and I can’t bring myself to tell him the truth.
REVIEW:
Lawson and Anders are identical twins. Anders suffers from PTSD from a horrific event some five years past and is to this day horrible at dealing with confrontations. Horrible as in they are severely panic inducing leaving him a quivering mess. Enter Lawson who more often than not steps in to handle Ander’s messes; breaking up with people. Anders gets to have all the fun while Law gets water poured over his head. Not that he minds helping out his brother, but by now he has the breaking up part down to a pat. So when Anders asks him yet again to help him out, he agrees. Only this time he pretends to be Anders going on the blind date he was sent to break off. It was supposed to be one night where he could explore his bisexual side and get it out of his system.
But then things takes a turn for the (very) complicated. Reid (the blind date) shows up at Law’s work and the two forms a friendship. Not only that; but while Law is hanging out with Reid as friends he is also hooking up with him pretending to be his brother Anders. Confused? Well, I told you it was getting complicated. 😉
I was surprised how much I enjoyed this story, but I do love a good mistaken identity thing. Not that there was an honest mistake behind the whole Lawson / Anders mess, but I enjoyed it all the same. And I absolutely loved the banter, it made me smile more than once. At the same time there were parts that made me angry. All in all it was a good story, and I can’t wait to listen to Anders story. Something tells me it’s going to be heart-breaking.
Dual narrations can be really good or really bad, and for Unwritten Law I would have to say it falls in the latter category. Joel Leslie is a talented narrator, he knows his stuff, his characters, the voices. It just works. Which is not a surprise by any means. What is a surprise is that it kind of got lost in Ferguson’s narration. But maybe that’s because listening to him doesn’t require anything but sitting back to relax and enjoy.
Antony Ferguson on the other hand was far from Leslie’s calibre, and that becomes glaringly obvious when the two were paired together. While he did try to do different voices for the different characters, he could never maintain them – and also changed voices for the MCs. So in the end the entire book was this jumble of miss-matched voices and I honestly couldn’t tell which voice belonged to which character. It wasn’t that there were a myriad of characters and voices to keep track of in the first place, because that will make things a lot more difficult. I’d estimate that there were maybe a handful of characters in total. So in the end I don’t really get why two narrators were needed, because it sure didn’t help the story any.
I don’t normally comment on the technical stuff, or the production of the audiobooks. Mainly as I don’t really have anything to say about it. This time around I do have a few comments to add. Leslie and Ferguson narrated different POV’s, Leslie narrated the parts told by Reid and Ferguson handled Lawson’s part. This is pretty standard when we have dual narrations. What isn’t standard, at least not in my experience, is that the transitions between the two contrasts as so much. Let me give you a couple of examples; each time they switched off I needed to adjust the volume up or down because it would either be too high or too low. Frankly this gets annoying and very tedious very quickly, once or twice sure, but not the whole book.
The second thing that I was also obvious was that they were recorded in different studios; the sound quality was very different from each other. Now I know that I’ve come down hard on Ferguson, but not this time, his parts had much cleaner / clearer sound while Leslies sounded a bit muted. Neither were bad in themselves, but having the same sound quality throughout makes for a better listen – at least for me. It wasn’t annoying to the point where the audio should be avoided at all costs, but annoying all the same.
RATING: 
Story: 4,5 hearts
Narration: 2 & 4 hearts
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