Narrated by Alex Wyndham

The Winter Companion is the fourth and final book in Mimi Matthews’ Parish Orphans of Devon series, which follows four young men who formed strong bonds of friendship as boys and who remain close friends in adulthood. This story takes place over the Christmas period and during a ‘family’ reunion as Justin, Tom and Alex (heroes of books 1-3) and their wives gather to celebrate the festive season at Justin’s North Devon home, which is where the fourth member of their group, Neville Cross, lives and works with the animals on the estate while also training to take over from Justin’s steward when he retires.

Unlike the other men – Justin went into the army, Tom moved to London and became a lawyer and Alex left England to make a living gambling and grifting – Neville never left Devon and doesn’t believe he ever will. An accident when he was younger left him with a brain injury which has affected his ability to transfer his thoughts into words. His thought processes and mental capacities are unaffected, but his difficulty in finding the right words – a situation which worsens whenever he’s nervous – has caused many to believe him to be lacking in intelligence. His friends know differently of course, but Neville is very self-conscious about it and prefers to have as little contact with other people as possible, instead spending most of his time with the horses and other animals in his care.

Lady’s companion Clara Hartwright accompanies her employer Mrs. Bainbridge (the widowed aunt of Laura, heroine of A Convenient Fiction) to Greyfriars Abbey for the Christmas season, and meets Neville when she asks if he will help to care for the elderly pug she has ‘inherited’ from her previous employer. Clara is working as a companion in order to help fund her brother Simon’s education at Cambridge, but she has plans for her future that do not include spending days fetching and carrying for others. When Simon, who is studying the natural sciences, has finished his education and strikes out in the world as a naturalist, he has promised to employ Clara as his secretary, and she longs for the day when she will be able to take up her pen to catalogue and describe all his findings and ideas. Simon has been sending Clara his lecture notes, which she has been eagerly studying and devouring, feeling that even though she cannot attend university herself, she is studying the course through Simon’s correspondence.

The Winter Companion is a gently moving, character-driven story that builds slowly, allowing time for Neville and Clara to become friends before they consider that there might be the possibility of their becoming anything else. Clara is quickly able to see beyond Neville’s speech impediment and recognise the caring, compassionate, shy man behind it, while Neville sees past the drab companion to the vibrant young woman with hopes and dreams he longs to know. They’re perfectly nice, perfectly decent people – but I didn’t find either of them particularly memorable, and their romance is fairly tepid. I said something similar in my review of A Convenient Fiction; I’m not talking about the fact that Ms. Matthews writes ‘closed door’ romances, I just never felt any real spark or strong emotional connection between them. The conflict in the story is mostly born of Neville’s low self-esteem and his tendency to play safe; I think the author may have been trying to intrigue listeners with hints about Clara’s backstory, which is one of the reasons she feels it incumbent on her to help support her brother, but it was easy to guess and ultimately, the whole thing was rather dull. I did feel for Clara late on in the book, when she realises that the life she’d envisaged for herself was never going to be, but otherwise, the plot is very slight. It’s also almost completely devoid of humour.

I appreciated the author’s attention to period detail; her descriptions of the Christmas traditions at Greyfriars is evocative and her characters always behave and speak in a manner that befits the time at which the books are set – and that’s not something I can say very often about the majority of historical romances being published at the moment.

Alex Wyndham has always been a go-to narrator for me, although when I reviewed his performance in the previous book in the series, I remarked upon the fact that while his overall performance was good, he’d adopted an odd sort of half-whisper for most of the narrative and some of the dialogue I didn’t recall hearing before and that I didn’t particularly care for.  His voice is deep and rich with lots of ‘tone-colour’ to it, and I found it a real shame that he seemed to have decided to stick with a limited palette (for want of a better comparison!) rather than to use the full range of the tones and timbres he has available to him.  I picked up The Winter Companion in the hope of discovering that what I’d previously noted was an anomaly, but sadly, I can’t really say that it was, and I hope it’s not a permanent change. In every other respect, his performance is every bit as accomplished as I’ve come to expect from him; well-paced, clearly differentiated and emotionally nuanced. He does an especially good job with Neville’s speech, not injecting overly long pauses or over-exaggerating his hesitancy. The character’s frustration at not being able to express himself as he wishes to comes through clearly as well. All the heroes of the previous books appear here and are clearly delineated and easy to identify, and the softer, higher-pitch Mr. Wyndham adopts to portray the ladies is appropriately feminine. I particularly enjoyed his interpretation of Mrs. Bainbridge as a bit of an Edith Evans-esque grande dame.

While The Winter Companion is the fourth in a series, it works perfectly well as a standalone, as enough information is given about the relationship between the four former orphans for a listener new to the series to be able to make sense of the story. That said, I’ve read and/or listened to three of the books in the series, and I think this is the weakest; it’s nice, the characters are nice… but not much happens. As I said in my review of A Convenient Fiction, I seem to be in a minority – Ms. Matthews has many fans, but three books I’ve individually rated no higher than a B- would indicate that this author is not for me.

In the end, I can’t recommend The Winter Companion. The narration, even with the issues I’ve noted, is good, but the story is dull and uneventful, and the characters are unmemorable.