Narrated by Melissa Moran

I’ve read and listened to a number of Mary Burton’s romantic suspense titles, and have enjoyed their well-constructed plots, engaging characters and atmospheric writing. Burn You Twice is a standalone story, a gripping mystery with a bit of psychological suspense thrown in as listeners follow detective Joan Mason as she tries to find out the truth behind the arson attack that almost killed her and her best friend a decade earlier.

Not long after the fire, Joan left the small town in Montana where she grew up and went to live and work in Philadelphia. Now a homicide detective, she’s been put on a temporary suspension because she made an… unfortunate … arrest (her prime suspect was the daughter of a judge) while working an arson case, and decides to use that time go back to Missoula to see if she can finally get some answers to the questions about the night of the college fire that have continued to plague her over the intervening years.

It’s a fortunate coincidence for Joan that the beginning of her period of suspension coincides with the release from prison of Elijah Weston, the man convicted of setting that fire, and who has always, throughout ten years of incarceration, maintained his innocence. Unbeknownst to all, Joan has been corresponding with Weston for years, hoping he would eventually confess his guilt to her, but he never has; and now he’s been released, she’s convinced he’ll strike again and is determined to do whatever she can to stop that happening.

She’s only just arrived in town when a massive fire at a local beauty shop destroys the place completely – and the remains of a young woman are found amid the debris. Elijah Weston is the obvious suspect – but he has an iron-clad alibi for the night of the fire, and the extent of the destruction leaves the investigators very little to go on.

The author has crafted an intriguing story that moves at a good pace and has plenty of twists, turns and red herrings at the same time as it explores the relationships between Joan and some of the people she left behind when she fled to Philly. Her best friend, Ann is now the mother of a ten-year-old boy; she was pregnant at the time of the fire but didn’t know it, and married her long-term boyfriend, firefighter Clarke Mead, soon after Joan left. Even though they had been really close, their relationship dwindled to Christmas cards and the odd phone call, a situation probably not helped by the fact that when Joan ran out on Missoula and Ann, she also ran out on her boyfriend Gideon – Ann’s brother. All Joan really knows about Gideon is that he married another woman not long after Joan left, that he’s now a widower and he also has a ten-year-old son – and that he’s a detective in Missoula.

So Joan and Gideon team up (reluctantly at first on Gideon’s part) to investigate further and as they do so find themselves unexpectedly delving back into the history that they – and Ann and Elijah – share. And as they work to find the arsonist, Joan starts to question some of her long-held convictions – and she and Gideon begin to realise that ten years apart hasn’t lessened their mutual attraction or erased their feelings for one another.

The best thing about this book is the mystery and the author’s ability to slowly ratchet up the tension as the story proceeds. I liked most of the characters, although I never really warmed (!) to Joan and the most interesting and best developed of all is Elijah, who is an unsettling – and oddly captivating – mix of quirky and creepy.

On the downside, I had no trouble figuring out who the villain was and Gideon was pretty ineffectual as a hero; Joan seemed to take over the investigation even though she had no real authority; she put people in danger and broke rules which could have jeopardised a conviction. And speaking of Gideon and Joan, if you like your romantic suspense to have an actual romance in it, then this book is unlikely to work for you. Some of the reviews I’ve read were delighted there were no romance cooties all over it, but if you’re going to categorise a book as romantic suspense, then it’s misleading when there is NO romance until the last few pages, and even when there IS an attempt to include one, it’s so awkwardly unbelievable and obviously shoe-horned in at the last minute that I’d rather it hadn’t been there at all. Even more unbelievable is Joan’s last-minute (almost literally) one-eighty about returning to Montana, when previously she’d been all about getting away and back to her life in Philadelphia.

A quick search at Audible reveals that Melissa Moran has over 200 titles to her credit, but she’s new-to-me, and while her performance is more than decent, there were a couple of things that didn’t work that well for me. Her narration is perhaps a little on the slow side, but not so much that it was a problem, her voice is a comfortable-to-listen-to mezzo, and her character differentiation is good across the board, with believable male voices. Her vocal acting is pretty good, but occasionally – and this was mostly in the narrative – her articulation is very ‘deliberate’, so that she sounds almost robotic. It is particularly noticeable in phrases where the author does not use a contraction (see what I did there?); I know that narrators are often asked to reproduce the text with 100% accuracy, and perhaps that was the case here, but unfortunately, it’s detrimental to the listening experience because it sounds so unnatural. Another odd thing is the way Ms. Moran pronounces words with a “t” in them; instead of pronouncing the “t”, she inserts a glottal stop, so she pronounces the author’s last name as “Burʔen”, and that’s far from the only example. (Is this a characteristic of her accent maybe?)

So, the audiobook of Burn You Twice is a mixed bag with middling results. In spite of my criticisms of Joan and the lack of romance, I did enjoy the suspense story, and will probably read or listen to the sequel when it comes out in 2021. As for Melissa Moran – she wasn’t terrible by any means, and I may listen to her again, but I can’t say she’s going to make my list of go-to narrators just yet.