Narrated by Teddy Hamilton & J.F. Harding

The Last Guy on Earth, the third book in Sarina Bowen’s The Hockey Guys series, is a nicely done second chance romance between a hot-shot coach and a veteran goalie whose youthful love affair fifteen years earlier came to an abrupt end when their careers began to take off and took them in different directions. It’s an emotional story with a lot of hurt and misunderstanding to work through before the pair can get their HEA, and the narration by Teddy Hamilton and J.F. Harding (who also teamed up for the first book in the series, The New Guy) is fabulous.

The last thing veteran goalie Jethro Hale expects when he’s called in to see management one cold December morning is to find out he’s part of some complex three-way mid-season trade that is going to send him to play in Colorado – for the team managed by his former teammate and former roommate, Clay Powers. After spending most of his career playing for Detroit (and having thought he’d end it there), Jethro is totally blindsided by the news, but there’s nothing he can do – either he plays in Colorado or he doesn’t play at all, and it’s not as though he can tell anyone why the Cougars is the last team on Earth he wants to play for. He and Clay have successfully managed to avoid each other for the past fifteen years, and although he can’t imagine that Clay is particularly happy about the trade, Jethro figures he must have had his reasons for signing off on it.

But Clay didn’t sign off on it. In fact, he’s furious with the General Manager for making the trade even after he’d told him not to; Clay wouldn’t want Jethro Hale on the team if he were the last goalie on Earth and doesn’t hesitate to say so – but the deal is done and there’s no way back from it. He’s supposed to coach the guy who ripped out his heart and threw it away fifteen years ago? If the situation wasn’t so awful, it might almost be funny.

The author delivers Clay and Jethro’s backstory in a series of well-placed flashbacks in the first half of the book, so we get to see how they started out rooming together during their rookie season, how they progressed from roommates to fooling around, and how it became more than just the physical for both of them – although at the time, Jethro had no idea that Clay was falling in love with him and Clay didn’t have the emotional maturity to be able to understand how Jethro’s insecurities affected his ability to recognise his feelings for Clay. It’s easy to dislike Jethro here; he says some hurtful shit and is wilfully oblivious to what’s happening, but the author turns it around somewhat after Clay leaves and we see just how completely devastated Jethro is by that.

The present day romance between Clay and Jethro is very much a slow-burn as they adjust to being in one another’s lives again after such a long time apart. They’re older and wiser now, complete with the extra baggage brought by the extra years, and I liked that there’s no insta-forgiveness here; it takes time and effort on both sides to work through the hurt and talk about what happened, and I appreciated that the author gives the story and the relationship time to breathe and develop. I really enjoyed listening to Clay and Jethro rediscovering their past friendship and finding some new common ground as they work out how to be around each other again. It’s not easy for either of them; Clay is understandably prickly because of how things ended all those years ago and Jethro is dealing with the sudden upheaval of his life – but I loved the way they gradually come to remember how they used to be, how they used to feel when they were around each other and realise that they still have something worth fighting for.

But those extra years bring extra complications. Jethro is currently the guardian of his ten-year-old nephew, Toby, while his sister is in prison (I had to wonder if it’s realstic that the NHL would just trade a player with a kid in school at a moment’s notice?), and he is also in the process of rebuilding his relationship with his long-absent father, who reappeared in his life quite recently. And while Clay has a stellar reputation as a coach – and is the youngest in the league – he sometimes struggles to deal with the immense amount of stress he’s under. Since their early love affair crashed and burned, Clay has confined himself to holiday hook-ups in the off-season, while Jethro has had a handful of relationships that have not lasted. But getting back together doesn’t just mean dealing with past hurts and misnuderstandings; Clay and Jethro are coach and player – effectively boss and employee – and a relationship between them could be a professional nightmare. And speaking of the professional… Sarina Bowen clearly knows her hockey and how to incorporate enough of it into a romance to make the sports aspect of the story believable but not to cause those of us who aren’t sports fans to want to zone out! The storyline about Jethro’s on-ice problems feels organic and makes for an interesting sub-plot.

J.F. Harding (who reads the chapters from Jethro’s PoV) and Teddy Hamilton (reading Clay’s) are two of my all-time favourite narrators, so having them team up again for this title is like winning the audio jackpot! They’re two of the best romance narrators out there and their experience shows; their performances are well-paced and expressive, they both use an impressive range of character voices and differentiate clearly between them so there’s never any confusion as to who is speaking in multi-character scenes. Both are very good at portraying female characters and J.F. Harding’s interpretation of Toby is unbearably cute without being over the top. Their interpretations of the two leads fit them really well; Mr. Hamilton gives Clay a definite tightly-wound vibe a lot of the time where the gruff world-weariness Mr. Harding injects into Jethro’s voice works well to show how adrift he’s feeling at the situation he’s been thrust into. The steamy scenes are superbly done, and they really deliver when it comes to conveying the intensity of the emotional connection between the two leads.

I’ve enjoyed all the (audio)books in this series, but for my money, The Last Guy on Earth is the best of the three, a lovely, swoony, second-chance romance between two guys who never got over each other realising they have the opportinity to start again if they’re brave enough to take it. Add the terrific narration into the mix, and you’ve got an audiobook worth adding to your DIK collection.

Breakdown of Grade: Narration – A; Story – B+

Running Time: 9 hours, 17 minutes