Trouble in High Heels by Christina Dodd ****

Trouble in High Heels by Christina Dodd

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This was a fun romp! It's the first in the Fortune Hunter series, and I read #3 first, and found it just ok. The genre must be suspenseful romantic comedy because it had moments of each.


Brandi had just moved to Chicago - in the winter - to be closer to her fiance Alan. She also just got a job with a prestigious law firm in Chicago, which she would start in just a few days. While having trouble getting settled in, what with frozen water pipes and a mistake in her furniture order, she received a call from Alan: he'd just gotten married in Las Vegas. In revenge, she pawned the engagement ring and spent it all on getting ready for a big charity ball she would now be attending alone. The revenge plan: pick up a man and spend the night forgetting all about Alan.


Roberto was that man: an Italian count rumored to be an international jewel thief. He was perfect except for one small detail she learned on her first day at work: she was his lawyer.

The narrator is Amanda Ronconi, a new-to-me narrator with 19 listings at audible.com. I liked her regular reading voice and her female characters a lot, her male voices and especially her Italian-accented male voices somewhat less. The gravelly/throaty voices and not-very-authentic foreign accents didn't work for me very well.

I think this story has the absolute best grovel scene I've ever read, and the last 20 minutes or so were pretty funny as I imagined what the scene looked like.

Thigh High by Christina Dodd ***

This is another of my "mini review" books I did for AAR's Speaking of Audiobooks - it was just a 3 star listen, but the first in the series was better - Trouble in High Heels - so I do plan to read the others. The review:

Thigh High by Christina Dodd

Narrated by Natalie Ross

When Jeremiah “Mac” MacNaught goes undercover in New Orleans for the bank he owns, he’s got a major lust-on for his bank’s employee Nessa Dahl but he’s also convinced she’s behind the annual Mardi Gras robberies, something he finds detestable. Nessa is working hard to help her eccentric great-aunts get out of debt, which is hard to do when her immediate boss is almost as difficult to work for as the bank’s owner. She’s assisting Mac (in disguise as the insurance inspector) in solving the robberies.

I rate narrator Natalie Ross a cut above run-of-the-mill, and her southern accents are generally good. I really enjoyed her narration of a Linda Howard favorite, After the Night, also set in Louisiana. She articulates Thigh High’s characters with age and gender-appropriate voices, even if I do have a quibble with some pronunciations and out-of-place or overdone local accents (I lived in south Louisiana). But these aren’t just characters, they are Characters. That being said, when a narrator is faced with the aunts from Arsenic and Old Lace, how else could she go about creating them in audio?

Christina Dodd is a new-to-me author and I wondered if her style in writing this Romantic Suspense was intended to be beyond-quirky comedy, or more like Linda Howard, whose realistically drawn characters are often in extremely humorous situations. I did laugh out loud a few times, but generally, the story veered sharply away from realism with the antics of heroine Nessa’s aunts. Was it comedy or tragedy? Suspense or allegory? Even after it was over, I couldn’t make up my mind. But the combination of intermittent humor with stock characters, love scenes that seemed without sufficient motivation, and a creepy villain not associated with any of the ongoing conflicts had me confused and kept this story from rising above a C for story.

Narration: B