I came into this expecting urban fantasy comfort food with a side of romance. What I got was... complicated.
Nora Roberts doing demon hunters and vampires should be my exact vibe. A woman raised to stake the undead, training a ragtag group that includes a 12th-century Irish sorcerer and a literal shape-changer from a mythical realm? Sign me up. The Circle Trilogy has all the bones of something I'd recommend on the podcast without hesitation. But Dance of the Gods—the middle child of this trilogy—has a problem. And that problem is named Dick Hill.
The Narrator Situation Is... A Lot
Dick Hill is an AudioFile Golden Voice. An Audie Award winner. The man has credentials. And yet I spent the first two hours wanting to throw my headphones across my apartment while Shirley watched with that judgmental cat stare she's perfected.
Here's the thing—Hill does character differentiation well. His brogue for the Geallian characters fits the story's mythological Irish bones. When Larkin gets flirtatious (and he gets very flirtatious), there's a warmth in the delivery that works. The emotional beats land. Caine's return to Mora genuinely got me.
But then we hit the steamy scenes.
I had to pause. Not because I was scandalized—please, I've listened to far worse at 2 AM with the lights off—but because something about a male narrator delivering Roberts' particular brand of heat just... didn't click. It's like watching someone's dad try to read a romance novel at a family gathering. Technically competent. Emotionally awkward. I kept adjusting the volume, which—according to other listeners—is apparently a universal experience with this recording.
Blair Murphy Deserves Better (And Also Maybe Therapy)
Blair is the standout here. Demon hunter with daddy issues and a failed engagement to someone who couldn't handle her literal monster-killing lifestyle? This understands that horror isn't about gore—it's about dread. That same psychological weight shows up in 1986 - Book 3: At the End of Time, where the real terror is what the characters carry with them. And Blair's particular dread—the fear of vulnerability, of letting someone in again—is the real monster she's fighting.
Roberts does something clever by making Larkin so persistently, annoyingly charming. He's from a land of legends. He can shift into any creature. And he absolutely will not stop flirting with the woman who could stake him without breaking a sweat. Court of Thorns and Roses plays with similar power dynamics between supernatural beings and mortal-adjacent women, though Maas leans harder into the fantasy worldbuilding. Their dynamic crackles even when the narration stumbles.
The Lilith subplot—vampire queen, Samhain deadline, the whole apocalyptic package—provides enough stakes (pun intended) to keep the fantasy engine running. But this is Roberts, so you know the real climax isn't the battle. It's whether Blair will let herself fall.
Middle Book Syndrome Hits Different in Audio
Dance of the Gods suffers from classic trilogy middle-child problems. It's setup. It's training montages. It's "we need to prepare for the big battle that's definitely happening in book three." In print, you can skim. In audio, you're committed to every sparring session, every strategic discussion, every moment where characters explain the mythology to each other (and therefore to us).
At 10 hours and 21 minutes, this isn't a quick listen. I got through most of it during a particularly long cataloging project at the library—the kind of mindless task where you need something to focus on that isn't the endless parade of returned materials. It worked for that. Would I have made it through during a dedicated listening session? Honestly, probably not.
Who's This Actually For?
If you're already invested in the Circle Trilogy, you need this to get to the finale. That's just how trilogies work. The story itself is solid Roberts—competent fantasy romance with enough supernatural elements to satisfy genre fans. Blair and Larkin's relationship builds believably. The world expands in interesting ways.
But the audiobook experience is genuinely divisive. Some listeners swear by Hill's emotional delivery. Others—and I'm hovering somewhere in this camp—find it distracting enough to consider switching to print. The production is clean, no weird sound effects or music to worry about, just Hill and his many character voices doing their best.
Skip this if: You're looking for genuine dread or horror-first storytelling. The horror elements are muted—this is romance first, urban fantasy second, horror a distant third. If you scare easily, you're fine here. If you want to be unsettled, look elsewhere.
Closing the Book (For Now)
My podcast listeners are going to have opinions about this one. Shirley was unimpressed by the entire experience. But she's unimpressed by most things that aren't her food bowl or the specific patch of sunlight on my bedroom floor. I was... entertained enough. Not terrified. Not transformed. Just entertained enough to keep going.
Sometimes that's all you need from a middle book.
