Reviewed by Larissa
TITLE: Hard Target
SERIES: Wrecked: Guardians, Book 1
AUTHOR: Kelly Fox
NARRATOR: Zane Daniels
PUBLISHER: Self-published
LENGTH: 6 hours and 12 minutes
RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2021
BLURB:
Everett: There are a ton of reasons why falling for my tiny, adorkable best friend is a terrible idea – starting with the body in my trunk.
I have other reasons – he still mourns his late husband. I’m way older, he’s a foot shorter, my tattoo shop is a front, he’s an assistant professor at UT.
Still, I can’t help but think we’d be perfect for each other if I didn’t kill people (very, very bad people) for a living.
Rafi: How the f–k did I not realize how hot my best friend is? Yeah, grief, or whatever, but were my eyes not working?
Silver fox, check. Tattooed hotness, check. Cuddles with me on Monday nights while we watch Australian melodramas, check. Says he’s not a good person but totally is, check.
New goal: Get Everett to stop looking at me like a grieving widower and start seeing me as someone he’d like to pin against the wall.
Now, if I only knew what was behind the door marked Portal to Nowhere…
Hard Target is a mercenary MM romance set in Austin and the Texas Hill Country. It features tattooed hotties, adorably complicated twinks, best friend antics, an illegally confiscated vineyard, and a team of killer do-gooders.
This is the first book in the Wrecked: Guardians Series. Several characters from the Wrecked series make an appearance, but the Guardians books can be listened to as stand-alones.
REVIEW:
Hard Target is the first book in Kelly Fox’s spin-off series Wrecked: Guardians. As you can likely tell from the name, the series derives from its predecessor, the Wrecked series, and many characters overlap. While billed as a stand-alone, Hard Target is hard to get into. I hadn’t read the prior series, and when the book opened, I felt like I had been dropped into the middle of something I had no context for. I found it disorienting. As the book progresses, Ms. Fox fills in the gaps for the most part, but an underlying feeling of “I’m missing something” thrums beneath the surface for the entire book. (For example, WTF is Wimberley??)
Rafi and Everett make for an unexpected, improbable pairing. It took a minute for them to click, but once they did, they’re seriously hot AF. Rafi and Everett are opposite in so many ways, perhaps the most pronounced being their size difference. However, they also mirror each other in many respects. An overarching theme in this story concerns Everett’s perception of Rafi as needing protection and caretaking because he’s small and delicate. Rafi is military trained like Everett, has seen horrible things, and performed unspeakable acts. He’s a highly lethal sharpshooter, but he wears his vulnerability on the outside. This contradictory picture is one Everett grapples with even as he falls deeper and deeper in love with Rafi.
When Hard Target opens, we see Everett and Rafi encounter each other for what I think is the first time, although it certainly seems like they knew each other well. Subsequently, they become best friends. I struggled with the authenticity of that relationship, even before it progressed to lovers. Maybe it was the abruptness of the introduction that threw me off. Or maybe it was Rafi’s styling and profiling with his BFF Parker in some misguided attempt to woo Everett. The latter, while humorous, was also incongruous with the larger plot.
Notwithstanding some plot weaknesses, though, Ms. Fox succeeds with her complex, colorful characters. Also, her sharp writing, and especially her snarky, witty banter and monologues, captivated me and kept me going even where I struggled early on. Well, that and the most significant selling point of the Hard Target audiobook – new-to-me narrator, Zane Daniels.
OMG, Zane Daniels … where have you been all my life?? I cannot adequately express how phenomenal his vocal performance is. He fully invests himself in his portrayal of these characters, and not just Rafi and Everett; I mean everyone. He sucked me into this world of morally ambiguous and loveable alpha males (and Parker, who’s alpha in her own way), and I was caught in his thrall. Just everything was on point. Even his female voice for Parker was convincing despite sitting in the alto range. I always knew who was speaking because Mr. Daniels’ character differentiation was so clear. Intonations, pacing, tone … Everything just works.
No disrespect to Ms. Fox, but I suspect I would not have enjoyed Hard Target as much if I didn’t have Mr. Daniels’ voice in my ears. This is a 4-Heart book in my opinion, but it’s a 10-heart vocal performance. I seriously did not want the audiobook to end.
Undisputedly, Zane Daniels is my new favorite narrator. Any flaws in the story itself are rendered irrelevant by Mr. Daniels’ vocal performance. Yes, it’s that good. So grab this audiobook. ASAP. That’s my unequivocal recommendation here. Trust me; you won’t regret it.
RATING: 
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