Slow and steady wins the race.

Ok so this is a really bizarre experience because I've listened to the first 3 books in this series and they were all narrated by Shannon Gunn and I enjoyed them so because I've read the books and this is just me listening to the audio books because I wanted to revisit a series that I had enjoyed years ago...until I got here and things kind of tanked a little for me.

 

Once again Shannon Gunn is the narrator and while I his idea of Adam's voice and the rest of the characters were ok, I can't lie Holden's voice...well...it was...let's just say it was not my idea of how Holden would sound and I might have found it a teensy bit annoying because truthfully for me it just didn't sound like a 40ish year old man but someone who was definitely older and at times the voice for me had a bit of a pervy undertone to it...sorry, but no...for me Holden's voice was just wrong and so for that reason and because he's one of the MCs the story can keep it's 4 stars but the audio only gets 3 stars from me.

Ex marine turned security professional and a boarding school teacher have the common mission to keep a student with a high profile parent safe. Good set-up, good chemistry, ok who-done-it. I like this series.

There really isn't anything terribly innovative, twisty or different about this story. Mark is a bit down on his luck and unlucky in love. Tony is a rock, but a bit elusive. I attribute my liking this to Tony's affinity to fill a pantry with stuff from Costco and Mark recognizing a dick-pic as his ex's fat bastard. In other words, the author seems to have a knack for just the right amount of relateable detail needed for a contemporary romance. What she is doing definitely is working for me. I only wish it were longer. In looking at this author's catalog, most her work appears to be under 200 pages. It makes me wonder what she might do with a further fleshed out story.

While the mystery part of this book was quite interesting (although I figured out the point much sooner than the MC), I did not enjoy the rest. Maybe it was because the book started when the MCs already knew each other, but I couldn't feel the attraction between them - they seemed to have so different world views and, apart from the lust, I didn't get why Finn liked Max and vice versa (Max did explain it a bit at some point, but why would he value the free spirit in Finn when he didn't want someone like that (who sounds like a great teacher) to tutor his relative?). I can't see them having a future together.
Something else that annoyed me was how the "bad guy" was described - in the finale, when the culprit was exposed, the author constantly drew attention to them being overweight, with every other sentence having "meaty", "beefy" or "puffy" in it. This wasn't necessary at all, so it just came over as a cheap way to show them as unattractive. Fat-shaming is not cool, and if I hadn't already bought one more book in this series, I wouldn't.