Mr. Perfect by Linda Howard

Mr. Perfect

Narrated by Laura Hicks

Perfect pretty much describes this wonderful story in audio! Linda Howard’s story is a perfect blend of suspense and humor in a romance novel and Laura Hicks’s character voices are absolutely perfect as well. When Laura reads Jaine, the heroine (“It was supposed to be Janine,” Jaine tells Sam, but they left the “n” off the birth certificate and her mother liked it), she brings the perfect amount of dry wit and scrappy-ness to her. Jaine doesn’t take sh-, er, anything from anyone, including her alcoholic neighbor who wakes her up in the middle of the night but complains if she makes noise during the day. OK, he’s not a drunk – he’s a cop on a task force, but she still doesn’t take any sh-, er, anything from him!

When Jaine’s group of women friends from work creates The List of qualities of the Perfect Man, none of them suspected the uproar it would cause when someone decided to publish the list in a newsletter. First the men start to grumble, their own boyfriends included, then someone starts making threatening phone calls to them. When one of the women is brutally murdered, they get a little worried – when the second one is done in by the same perp, the cops realize there’s a serial killer at work.

It’s Perfect that Sam and Jaine have such an adversarial relationship that quickly turns to heat; it’s perfect that they seem to share the same passion for cars, values, neighborhood, and many other things as well. It makes the relationship a natural and not a Soul Mate At First Sight kind of story. And Jaine is no TSTL heroine – when Sam tells her to stay away when he goes to crime scenes, she doesn’t think she has as much experience, skill and upper body strength as a trained cop to follow him into danger – no, she’s smart and stays behind.

All of Hicks’ character voices are perfect too – I have only one tiny quibble with her narration, and that’s her out-of-place nano-second pauses during narration. It’s not enough to be a big deal, just a little jarring. The story is kickass comedy with suspense as only LH does it, and the narration – long a Hard To Find audio, now easily available at Audible – does it Perfect Justice. Woot!

Melinda


Narration: A

Book Content: A+

Steam Factor: Glad I had my earbuds in

Violence: Graphic – there’s a serial killer and the murders are brutal.

Genre: Romantic Suspense

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

 

1 thought on “Mr. Perfect by Linda Howard

Comments are closed.