Great narration of a middling story

Casey Cox is an author I’ve been meaning to try for a some time, and The Flirty Vet also gave me the opportunity to listen to Rupert Channing (I think this might be his first m/m romance narration under this name) – a narrator whose been on my radar for a while, so I got to kill two birds with one stone with this one!

Wilby Linfox is an Australian vet who lives (and sometimes works) on the family’s remote cattle farm, and when the book begins, he’s just received some really bad news – namely that thanks to years of mismanagement, they’re in massive debt and will probably lose the farm and their home. He’s wandering the streets of Sydney after spending the evening drowning his sorrows, singing at the top of his voice when a guy shouts angrily from the window of his hotel room that he should cut it out as he’s trying to sleep. This is our other protagonist, Col Langdon, an American who has travelled to Australia on business and is struggling to deal with the jet lag.

That’s the meet-cute. Wilby is larger than life, an inveterate flirt with no verbal filter, and he invites Col out for a drink; Col figures he might as well seeing as he’s not going to sleep any time soon. They have a good night together (even thought it doesn’t have quite the happy ending they’d both hoped for!) and Wilby plays tour guide for most of the next day until Col has to leave. There’s a definite connection there, but there’s no time to explore anything further.

Of course, that isn’t the end for Wilby and Col, because it turns out that Col’s business is actually (coincidentally!) taking him to the remote small town of Scuttlebutt that is Wilby’s home. So far so good. And the first half of the book is a lot of fun, full of great dialogue and flirty banter and terrific chemistry (although the first sex scene is… odd – more of a list of locations they fu@&#d than an actual sex scene, and the a#$$hole winking was just… weird!), but it goes completetly off the rails once Col’s reasons for visiting Scuttlebutt are revealed.

Okay, it’s not hard to guess, because we’ve already learned that the company Col works for provides financial services to agricultural businesses – but I was really pleased when the story turned out NOT to be that of the evil-property-developer-out-to-land-grab versus impoverished-farmer-desperate-to-keep-the-family-farm. In fact, Col’s company specialises in helping people in Wilby’s position to achieve a positive outcome wherever possible – but instead of working with him, Wilby immediately assumes the worst and starts acting like a childish brat, won’t answer Col’s calls, texts or emails, and then decides to fly around the country to visit a couple of friends (a billionaire and reality TV star respectively) to see if they have any ideas as to what he can do. [From reading reviews, these characters appeared in other books by this author, and I’m not a fan of gratuitous ‘where are they now’ cameos when they serve no real plot-related purpose.]

The story never really recovers after this; instead of taking the opportunity for some character and relationship development in the middle section by showing Col and Wilby working together to save the farm, we get Wilby behaving like a petulant child and wasting time while time is literally running out on finding a way to save the farm. Wilby does man up eventually, of course, but by this point, the story is flagging and the rest of it involves much wringing-of-hands by Col and Wilby – two grown men - about how they can’t be together because they live in different countries but never really discussing their options.

For an audiobook that comes in at around nine and a half hours, there’s not a great deal of story here, but Rupert Channing’s narration was enough to keep me listening through the flabbier parts. I think he’s Australian, but his American accent is spot on and he switches seamlessly between accents in the dialogue, and from chapter to chapter (it’s alternating first person PoV). His portrayals of Wilby and Col are excellent; Wilby’s big, brash personality and Col’s more cautious nature are captured really well, and his interpretation of Wilby’s six-year-old nephew is credible and cute. It’s a strong performance all round, although some of the male voices – Wilby’s friends and colleagues, Col’s friend Brant – sound quite similar, and I sometimes needed dialogue tags to work out who was speaking. But I’d definitely listen to Mr. Channing again, and might pick up the next book in the series, which seems to be an “oops – we got married by accident!” story about two long-time (straight) friends.

To sum up – The Flirty Vet is a funny, low-angst story with a strong setting and some entertaining secondary characters. It started out strong, but lost its way around the halfway mark and never really got back on track. Rupert Channing’s narration is worth the price of admission, however, and I definitely plan on listening to him again.

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