Jax Calder Audiobooks

The Unlikely Spare: queer romance with a thriller edge, from the Unlikely Dilemmas books

1 audiobook reviewed

★ 4.5/5 average

1 listener rating

Who is Jax Calder?

Spare is a loaded little noun. It means the one who was never the plan, the second name on a list, and pairing it with unlikely sets up a story about somebody stepping into a role nobody intended for them.

Jax Calder writes The Unlikely Spare into a sequence our catalogue lists as Unlikely Dilemmas, and the shelving splits three ways: romance, LGBTQ+, and crime and thriller. Blends of that kind are a deliberate craft rather than an accident of tagging. The suspense supplies the pressure, the romance supplies the reason to care, and neither half works properly without the other.

That is the extent of what the record supports, and it is quite enough to tell you whether this is your sort of book.

Jax Calder in audiobooks

At close to thirteen hours, The Unlikely Spare is generously sized for contemporary romance, which usually signals a plot with somewhere to go beyond the central pair. Gary Furlong narrates, a considerable stretch of voice work for a book carrying romantic and criminal registers at the same time.

The listener verdict has barely begun. One rating sits behind the title so far, nowhere near enough to lean on, so the sensible move is to sample the opening rather than trust the number. Naming a series after dilemmas rather than after a character suggests each entry can be taken on its own, though starting where a sequence starts is rarely a mistake.

It is ready and waiting below.