Narrated by Tor Thom and Alexandre Steele

The Pros & Cons of Deception is the second book in the Pros & Cons series, and the synopsis for the series – a group of misfits is blackmailed into carrying out a series of missions left to them by a dead man – sounded like a mash-up of Leverage, Charlie’s Angels and Ocean’s Eleven and like it might be fun. Having finished this instalment, I not sure that “fun” is the word I’d use to describe it; in fact, it turned out to be rather silly, with a bunch of grown men acting and talking like hormonal, teenaged-boys, and a plot so thin as to be see-through.

Retriever of illicitly obtained information
Charlie Bingham is dead, and in his will, he left instructions for his lawyer,
Miranda Bosley (yep ;)) to bring together a disparate group of men – some of
them criminals, some not – in order to carry out his last instructions in
exchange for the destruction of the information Charlie held on each of them. In
the previous book, The Pros & Cons of Vengeance, ex-Special Forces
Close Protection specialist Steele Alvarez was instructed to take down a dirty
Senator – and along with hacker Wesley Bond, grifter Carson Grieves, thief
Ridge Pfeiffer and disgruntled FBI Agent Leo Shook – set about doing just that.
Along the way, he and the team rescued two young ex-hookers – Breck and Danny –
from a violent situation, and Steele fell for Breck (who happens to be Ridge’s
brother). When this book opens, we find them all, together with the enigmatic housekeeper
Josie (whom the author bills as an “International Woman of Mystery”),
comfortably holed up in Charlie’s luxury home in Miami.

I have to say here, that although the story mostly works as a standalone, I found myself a bit lost during the prologue – in which Miranda and the mysterious “Interested Party” discuss the next mission – and the first chapter, which features all the characters interacting and bantering with each other in a way that made it difficult for me to get much of a handle on who was who. It’s on me that I haven’t read or listened to the previous book, but the narration didn’t help; I had issues with Tor Thom’s performance in The Hunt recently, and sadly, found the same problems here, which made it difficult for me to settle into the listen. So I felt like the person who arrived late to the party and was wondering what I’d missed.

Anyway. The next mission is to be entrusted
to Wesley, the group’s red-haired, freckled and slightly nerdy hacker/tech
specialist, who has few social skills and gets tongue-tied around anyone he
finds attractive. (Which means he has a tendency to put his foot in his mouth
around the gorgeous Danny.) The information Miranda passes to Wesley points to
a people trafficking and slavery operation being run at the exclusive White
Sands Resort, a private holiday retreat for the mega-rich situated on a private
island off the Florida coast. It seems that most of the people working there
are from Central and South America or the Philippines; they’re recruited
through an employment agency and are then forced to remain there and to work
for next to nothing, with no possibility of leaving because their passports are
taken from them and held by the resort’s owner. Wesley’s mission (should he
choose to accept it!) is to bring down whoever is running the scam.

Somewhat implausibly, he manages to get his
team-mates jobs at the resort – which just happens to need a handful of new
staff – leaving Wesley to pose as a wealthy guest. Except a guy on his own at a
resort likely to be full of couples is going to stand out like a sore thumb, so
he finds himself reluctantly asking the charming and distractingly handsome,
nineteen-year-old Danny to be his fake-boyfriend for the duration of the
mission.

As soon as they arrive on the island, it’s
obvious there’s something underhand going on. The staff are not well treated, the
owner’s personal assistant, Davis, looks like a model but his demeanour screams
“Fed” rather than “PA”, and his son, Brandon is a creep determined to get his
hands on Danny as quickly and as often as possible. Something which, naturally,
doesn’t go down at all well with Wesley.

I like the fake-relationship trope in
general, and it works reasonably well here, although there isn’t much chemistry
between Wesley and Danny and their romance is basically insta-lust. Wesley is –
quite rightly I thought – concerned about the fact that Danny is only nineteen
(Wesley is twenty-seven) and has spent the last two years (since he was thrown
out by his conservative, well-to-do family for being gay) on the streets,
although Danny is surprisingly well-adjusted about it all and doesn’t dwell on
his experiences or want others to dwell on them. I liked that he was
forward-looking and wanted to get on with the rest of his life now he was in a
position to do so. There’s no real romantic conflict though; Danny and Wesley
are attracted to each other and apart from Wesley’s concern over Danny’s
relative youth, there’s nothing to prevent their being together. The
fake-relationship doesn’t stay fake for very long (no surprise there), and the
ILYs come pretty much out of the blue; the guys spend time together being
couple-y for the sake of their cover, and time together privately, but I never
got the sense of a relationship or connection developing between them. Also not
developed is the plot; there’s very little investigating going on here, and
very little suspense; Wesley’s moment of discovery takes place off-screen so
all the listener knows about what he’s been doing as regards finding out the
truth about what’s going on at White Sands is when he tells everyone that he’s
found it!

I’ve listened to both narrators once before and have definitely preferred one to the other. I reviewed Tor Thom recently in The Hunt by J.M Dabney and Davidson King, and sadly didn’t find much to like about his narration there. But I like to give narrators a couple of tries to impress me, so I decided to listen to him again; unfortunately, the results were the same. He has a very deep voice (think Aiden Snow but nowhere near as good!) but speaks in a kind of soft, half-whisper most of the time, and he has a habit of taking breaths mid phrase or sentence, which really messes with the natural rhythms of speech. Once again, he delivers the narrative and most of the dialogue in a bored monotone and his character differentiation is minimal – what little there is is done with very broad strokes. Wesley and Danny both speak in a slightly higher register than many of the other characters, so while it’s possible to work out that one of them is speaking, it’s pretty much impossible to tell which one. And the female characters… ugh. Alexandre Steele, on the other hand, was much more pleasant to listen to. His performance is animated and expressive, and his vocal characterisations far more distinct, so it was easier to identify speakers aurally. But while he has a pleasant speaking voice, there was no way I could buy him as a youth of nineteen. Age isn’t something I normally bother about too much when listening to a book; I don’t expect a nineteen-year-old character to be performed by a nineteen-year-old narrator! – but there was just too much of a disconnect here.

I read the sample chapters of The Pros
& Cons of Deception on Amazon when I started writing this review (to
check some names and spellings) and from that, I suspect the “fun” element I
felt was missing in the audio may well be present in the print version. So if
you like the sound of a drama-light heist-type caper with lots of banter and
want to check it out, I’d suggest sticking with print rather than going with
audio.

Note: Genre is listed as Romance > Suspense at Audible, but it’s not much of either!