Narrated by Greg Tremblay

I listened to Fire and Granite is book two, and like its predecessor, it’s a fairly low-angst, low-drama listen with a tender and rather sweet romance at its centre.

Deputy Clay Brown is one of a team
escorting a high-risk, dangerous criminal from prison to the courthouse when their
vehicles are ambushed, and the prisoner – who by a weird quirk of fate happens
to be Clay’s cousin Harper Grange – is sprung in what is clearly a well-planned
operation. Clay is frustrated at being on the other end of the investigation
rather than being out there looking for the escapee, so he’s not too pleased
when he’s handed a different assignment. Judge Andrew Phillips was responsible
for putting Grange behind bars, and less than an hour after the ambush,
received a phone call threatening his life. Clay is assigned as his protection
detail while Grange is at large – but as he doesn’t exactly get along with “Judge Moody and Superior” or like him
very much, it’s going to be a difficult few days.

Judge Phillips is tough, fair and by the
book; he doesn’t suffer fools, he doesn’t tolerate theatrics in his courtroom, he
runs things with an iron hand and likes things just so – so the last thing he wants
is round-the-clock protection and someone telling him what to do, where to go
and basically interfering in his well-ordered life. As if it’s not bad enough
to be getting death threats from a whack-job criminal, he’s also got to put up with
“impatient control freak” Deputy Clay
Brown 24/7… and make sure he keeps a tight lid on the powerful pull of
attraction he feels towards him.

It’s not surprising that two such strong
personalities should clash, and it’s not long before the pair are butting heads
over the fact that Andrew doesn’t like feeling so out of control. But he soon
has to concede that Clay knows what he’s doing – and agrees not to take any
unnecessary risks. Andrew is reluctantly impressed when Clay takes his
acquiescence without gloating over it – and is more than a little surprised
when the deputy suggests that it would make more sense for Andrew to stay at
his house for the next few days rather than the other way around.

After this, both men start to drop their
guards around each other, and Andrew has to admit to himself that Clay isn’t at
all the jerk he’d originally thought him; he’s kind, down-to-earth and
incredibly intuitive, offering a quiet, steady comfort that Andrew needs – and
likes – very much. And Clay begins to realise that the stern judge he’d met in
the courtroom is a very different man from the Andrew he’s coming to know, a
man with a tender heart and a vulnerability he keeps firmly under wraps.

It’s been a couple of days since the
escape, and Grange is somehow managing to stay one step ahead of the police and
is no nearer to being brought in when Andrew receives news that up-ends his
already turned-inside-out life. His sister is in the hospital following a
suicide attempt, and is in no state to take care of her two young children.
There’s absolutely no question that Andrew is going to let Duane and Auburn be
put into the foster system; no matter what else is going on in his life, he’s
going to look after those kids and give them some badly needed stability. Clay
is impressed – and touched – at Andrew’s willingness to suddenly assume
responsibility for the kids, especially in light of the problems he’s already
facing, and he’s not going to let him do it alone.

I admit that when I read the synopsis for Fire and Granite, I thought the
storyline sounded a little similar to the previous book, which also involved a
judge and a protagonist with young children. Fortunately, however, those
similarities are mostly superficial and this story takes a very different
direction. One of the criticisms I had of Fire
and Flint was that the suspense plotline running in the background was too
easily wrapped up; here, however, the fact that Andrew is being threatened
means that storyline is more prominent – not overly so, but present enough that
the danger Andrew and Clay are facing is never far away from the mind of the
listener while the guys are falling in love and then finding their feet as de facto parents to two young children.

The chemistry between Clay and Andrew is
undeniable, but their romance progresses very quickly; they’re exchanging ILYs
after just a matter of days, so we’re in insta-love-land here. With that said,
however, they’re so cute together and so supportive of each other that I could just
about believe they’d fallen for each other in so short a time (I also suspect
that the way the emotion between the pair is so strongly conveyed by Greg
Tremblay helped to convince me!). There were, however, a couple of plot points
I found harder to accept. Even though he hardly knew his cousin, would Clay
have been allowed anywhere near a case involving a family member? And when we
discover the deeper reasons behind Grange’s vendetta against Andrew, I had to
ask myself if Andrew had acted correctly in presiding at his trial. I get that
this is fiction, but both those things seemed a little tenuous.

So yes, there are a few fault-lines in the
story, but there are none whatsoever in the narration, which will come as no
surprise to anyone who’s ever listened to Greg Tremblay. I will almost always
opt to listen to a book rather than read it if he’s narrating, because of the
extra dimension he brings to what’s on the page. He imbues everything he
narrates with a degree of realism that is achieved by few other performers; his
delivery is always perfectly paced, characters are well-differentiated and
characterised, and the emotions felt by those characters feel genuine and true
to life. All those things are true of his performance here; the growing warmth
and affection between Andrew and Clay is beautifully portrayed and I have to
give a shout-out to his excellent renditions of Auburn and Duane, which are
sufficiently childlike to be convincing without resorting to caricature.

An enjoyable addition to the Carlisle Deputies series, Fire and Granite is an undemanding
though engaging romance with a dash of suspense, all wrapped up in another
superb performance from Greg Tremblay.