Narrated by Wilhelmina Grace

I’ve had the first three books in the Ars Numina series on my TBR since they each were released but hadn’t managed to read them yet, so I was excited to see them coming out on audio. The Leopard King is the first book in the series and sets up a lot of the world-building as well as telling the story of Dominic Asher, the Pride Leader of the Ash Valley pride of cats and Pru Bristow, the best friend of Dominic’s murdered first wife. I did try a small sample of the narration first but unfortunately the performance did not live up to my hopes.

When the story begins, Dom has been living
away from the pride for nearly three years, since the death of his first wife,
Dalena. He is lost without her and is deeply grieving. The pride has been run
by Dom’s second, Slay in his absence but there is an important Conclave coming
up with the Bears, Wolves, Golgoth and Eldritch where their peace treaty is due
to be renewed. Slay is no diplomat and wants Dom back in charge when the
negotiations commence.

Slay sends his friend and sometime-lover,
Pru Bristow to the retreat where Dom has been staying, tasking her with bringing
the Pride Leader back. Pru was Dalena’s best friend and the four of them – Dom,
Slay, Pru and Dalena – grew up together and were best friends. Pru has been in
love with Slay since forever but she is a “latent” (she can’t shift into her
cat form) and Slay refused to mate with her because of it. Still, she and Slay
have a complicated relationship where she still loves him and hopes he will one
day change his mind and/or that she will become able to shift and that may
bring about acceptance from his family (which seems to be the major
barrier). 

As a friend of Dom’s and as a latent, Pru
is both well-placed to achieve the goal of bringing Dom back but also
expendable. She’s not required for guard duty and wouldn’t be missed from the
Pride as much. At least, that’s what Pru thinks is Slay’s motivation.

When Pru and Dom clash at the retreat, he
makes a rash deal with her. He will return to the Pride when she becomes able
to shift and only on condition she become his mate. He thinks this will make
her go away but he vastly underestimates Pru – something that happens a lot.

There’s no surprise with what happens next.
I found the shift on Dom’s behalf from grief-stricken to functional a little
fast given his backstory. On the one hand they agree to mate “for the good of
the Pride” but there is clearly a sexual connection and a burgeoning romance as
well and sometimes the two things jarred a little.

I found Pru’s journey really interesting. I
liked that she had feelings for Slay which she had to put away for the good of
the pride. There was something of the marriage of convenience trope to it and
it’s a favourite of mine. However, her feelings for Dom developed very quickly
given how she felt about Slay and sometimes this felt a little uneven too.

Pru was amazing. She’s been underestimated
all her life but she’s very much the backbone of the pride. She was a badass
and I loved her. I especially liked that she stood up for herself and decided
to value herself as she deserved.

I also liked that the relationship Dom and
Pru developed was their own and that Dalena was never demonised. It took them a
while to reconcile their complicated feelings but, in the end, Pru and Dom
realised they deserved to be happy together. I also very much appreciated that
Dom and Pru talked to one another about hard things and didn’t let
miscommunication stand in their way.

In terms of the broader story arc, which
will no doubt continue in the later books, the Conclave goes badly and the
clans end up in a brutal war which costs the pride dearly. By the end of The Leopard King the battle may have
been won but the war is far from over.

Narratively, Ms. Aguirre made what felt
like an unusual authorial choice to use a lot of internal monologue for the
main characters. In the midst of the storytelling in the third person, there
would suddenly be some first person thinking from one of the characters, rather
than keeping things in third. To give an example:

Most likely he should’ve caught it sooner, but drink, isolation, and inactivity had blunted his senses. Some apex predator I am. He switched on the light and closed the distance between them, his heart lurching in his throat.

Sometimes it worked better than others. As
a reading/listening preference I like this device to be used more sparingly
than it was in this book. That said, it is difficult to know how much of my
reaction was to the audiobook experience itself. It can be hard to
differentiate on audio between narrative, dialogue and internal monologue. I
couldn’t always immediately tell which was which as the story progressed and
there was so much internal monologue I found myself tripping over it more than
usual.

The narration didn’t impress me I’m afraid.
Ms. Grace’s timbre is pleasant to listen to but her cadence and pacing were all
wrong. Pauses were in the wrong places and emphasis on the wrong words in the
sentence – sometimes changing the meaning from what was clearly intended by the
text. Added to that, there were multiple errors where words were mispronounced
“fingering” instead of “figuring” (I think you can tell how this makes a
different to a listen) and some words were just made up. At one point something
was “constituated” instead of “constituted”. These were vocal errors – I checked
the text in my ebook. I’m not sure whether this was an issue with the narration
or the editing or both but in any event, it did the book a disservice.

Ms. Grace’s voice for Dom was okay. Not the
best I’ve heard but not awful either. However, when it came to other male
characters, particularly Slay, the voices used didn’t always work for me. In
relation to Slay the narrative choice had the effect of rendering him quite
emotionally one-note which I don’t think was consistent with how he was written.

I expect I’d have enjoyed the story more
had I read the book rather than listened to it. I found myself frustrated by
the narration and often tempted to skip forward (although I didn’t).

On the one hand, the narration was
competent. I could understand the words, there were no audible breath sounds
and Ms. Grace’s voice was, for the most part, easy enough on the ear. But I
didn’t enjoy the narration for the reasons above and I can’t see myself
continuing with this series on audio.