Reckless Abandon (Holly Barker #4; Stone Barrington #10) by Stuart Woods
My Rating:  2 of 5 Butterflies

Title:  Reckless Abandon
Author:  Stuart Woods
Narrator:  Tony Roberts
Series:  Holly Barker #4; Stone Barrington #10
Length:  Unabridged; 7 hours; 20 minutes
Publisher:  Brilliance Audio
Published:  June 10, 2004
Source:  Library
Format:  Audiobook
Genres:  Fiction; Mystery
Subjects:  Private Investigator; Fugitive from Justice; Stone Barrington; Holly Barker; Police Women; New York

Synopsis: 

      Stone Barrington is, once again, right at home in New York City; but this time he is joined by the tenacious Holly Barker from Orchid Blues, the lady police chief of Orchid Island, Florida. In Reckless Abandon, Holly finally makes it to Manhattan, hot on the trail of an evil fugitive from her jurisdiction. Stone is, well, glad to see her, right up until the moment when her presence creates a great danger to both of them - and to their surprise, she becomes the pursued, not the pursuer.

My Review:
Goodreads lists this book as book #4 in the Holly Barker series, however, it is mainly listed as Book #10 in the Stone Barrington series.  As I was preparing this review, I found that if you look on the Stuart Woods website, he only has this book listed under the Stone Barrington series, and not at all under the Holly Barker series, which really makes sense given that the whole time I was listening to this book, I kept telling myself, man this book is more about Stone than Holly, and getting agitated with that fact.

I found myself not really liking this story.  Now I've never read any of the Stone Barrington books, so maybe if I had a little more background of him, I may have enjoyed it a little more, but I haven't, so I didn't.  Even though I didn't care for Reckless Abandon, it won't stop me from finishing the Holly Barker series.  It appears that the last two books in the series are back to Holly, and she is a character that I have really come to like, so I'm glad to hear that!

Previous Holly Barker books have had two narrators, a male and a female, but Reckless Abandon did not.  I did not care for that at all!  I believe that book 1's narrator was a single female, and she did fine, but having a single narrator as a male, in a female series book, just didn't work out well, in my opinion.  It wasn't that Tony Roberts was a bad narrator, because he wasn't, but I didn't feel that he tried at all to distinguish between the characters, especially the different gendered characters.  I was disappointed with this audio version.

The plot was different from which I am used to reading, so it was nice to have the uniqueness, however, I feel like the story drug on quite a bit.  I almost think that this could have been a novella and still equally entertaining.  There just didn't seem to be much to work with.  There were also other sub plots going on that took the lime light away from the main plot at hand, finding Holly's fugitive from justice.  I just didn't feel like that particular part of the story developed very well!

Overall, I really didn't care for this nearly as much as I have the past three Holly Barker books, but I do look forward to book 5, Iron Orchid, and hope that it focuses more on Holly!  I don't typically read male author's, and I feel that the plots and characters always have a more masculine feel to them, but change is good and I have come to appreciate the writing of Stuart Woods.  I believe that Reckless Abandon could have solely been a Stone Barrington series book, so I look forward to getting back to more Holly Barker soon!

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