This book made me feel like I was watching one of Abuela's telenovelas — the kind where you're yelling at the screen because the two people who obviously belong together keep dancing around it, and there's a mystery subplot that honestly exists just to give them something to do besides stare at each other. And I mean that with love.
Silas Sloane Made Me Want to Move to a Small Town (Almost)
So I picked this up on a Sunday morning while reworking a logo suite for a brewery client — the kind of repetitive vector work where your hands are busy but your heart is free. And honestly, the setup hooked me fast. Silas is this small-town cop who everyone knows and loves but who keeps his romantic life deliberately shallow, and Everett is this snarky widower who got dragged to O'Leary, New York, to care for his grandfather. The friction between Everett's "I don't want to be here" energy and Silas's golden retriever protector thing? The chemistry is chef's kiss. There's a moment early on where Everett is being his most prickly self and Silas just... doesn't flinch. Doesn't try to fix it. Just stays. That quiet steadiness — I had to pause and pet Diego because my chest got tight.
May Archer writes banter that actually sounds like two people flirting, not two writers trading quips. Everett's superstitious streak — the way he reads signs into everything — gave me such Abuela energy. She used to side-eye broken mirrors and spilled salt like they'd personally wronged her. So when Everett does his little rituals and Silas takes them seriously instead of making fun? My heart. MY HEART. Abuela would have loved this one.
The mystery subplot about strange disappearances in O'Leary is... fine. It's there. It does what it needs to do to keep the plot moving and give Silas something cop-related to stress about. But let's be real — I was not listening for the mystery. I was listening for the moment these two idiots finally stop orbiting each other.
Two Narrators, Two Very Different Energies (And That's a Problem)
Okay, here's where I have to be honest, and it hurts because the story earned better. This is a dual-narration setup — Iggy Toma and Alexander Cendese trading chapters based on POV. And Iggy Toma? Incredible. That first chapter alone — the comedic timing on the internal monologue, the way he lands a joke without overselling it — I actually laughed out loud and Frida gave me her most withering stare from across the desk. Toma gets the rhythm of Archer's humor. He breathes with the text.
Cendese is a different story. His pacing runs hot — sentences stacked on sentences without pauses, like he's trying to beat a clock. For a book I'm savoring at 1.0x, that mismatch was noticeable. When you're toggling between a narrator who lets silence do work and one who fills every gap, it's jarring. It pulled me out of the romance at moments that needed me fully in it.
And then there's the women. Both narrators went for this syrupy, almost cartoonish register for female characters, and — look. I grew up on telenovelas. I have a high tolerance for dramatic women. But these voices sounded like parodies. Every time a woman spoke, I winced. It's 2024 (well, whenever you're reading this), and we can do better with female side characters in M/M romance narration. We just can.
The dual narration concept is solid in theory — alternating POVs should mean you get deeper into each guy's head. I had similar mixed feelings about the narration choices in Thick as Thieves, where the voice work kept pulling me just slightly out of a story that deserved my whole attention. But when the two voices are this tonally different, it's less "two sides of a love story" and more "two separate audiobooks shuffled together." I kept having to mentally readjust.
This Is a Rainy Sunday Book (With Caveats)
The vibes are immaculate when the story is just Silas and Everett in their bubble — the slow gravitational pull, Everett's walls coming down one sarcastic comment at a time, Silas learning that commitment doesn't have to mean losing himself. This book felt like the first cool front in Austin after a brutal summer — that relief of something finally shifting. That slow-burn gravitational pull reminded me of what I loved about Dirty: A Dive Bar Novel — another one where two people keep circling each other while the reader is practically begging them to just stop moving. I ugly-cried once, softly, near the last quarter, at a moment about letting someone stay after you've built your whole identity around being alone.
But the narration inconsistencies kept snagging me. And at 8.5 hours, the pacing could've been tighter — the mystery padding stretched some middle chapters thin.
Who should grab this: If you love small-town M/M romance with a grumpy-sunshine dynamic and you can tolerate uneven narration, the story underneath is genuinely sweet and earned. Series fans of Love in O'Leary will eat this up. If you're narrator-sensitive like me — maybe try a sample first and see if the voice switching bothers you.
The Spreadsheet Says One Cry, But My Heart Says More
I wanted to love this audiobook unreservedly. The writing deserved it. Silas and Everett deserved it. But the audio execution held it back from being the warm hug it could've been. Still — that core love story? Still got me. Still made me text my best friend at 11 PM like "you need to read this immediately." The bones are beautiful. I just wish the narration matched.
