Fox Hunter

June 19, 2017
Sharp’s uneven 12th Charlie Fox thriller (after 2016’s Absence of Light) takes the close protection specialist to Iraq. Charlie once had a career with the British army, until she was gang-raped by a group of fellow soldiers. The men were acquitted, and Charlie left the army. Years later, she has learned to live with this traumatic experience, but only recently has she spoken of it to her on-again, off-again lover, Sean Meyer, a close protection colleague. Sean, who suffered a near-fatal head injury a few months earlier, has now gone off the grid and appears to be seeking revenge on Charlie’s behalf, tracking down the men responsible in Iraq, where many are private military contractors. Charlie’s boss believes that Sean tortured Michael Clay, one of her rapists, to death. Charlie doubts Sean would have been so brutal, and though her job is to find and stop Sean, she must also figure out what’s really going on. Sharp spares no gruesome, or technical, details, but the heart of previous books is missing in this entry, to its detriment.

Narrator Lucy Paterson delivers Charlie Fox's tough soldier-of-fortune voice perfectly in this fast-paced suspense. Fox is being pursued across Iraq and Kuwait by who knows whom for who knows what reason. Paterson excels at vocal differentiation. In several scenes there are three young women and a middle-aged woman doing a lot of talking, and there is never any doubt about who is speaking. And she has no problem with all the testosterone-driven males either. She does especially well impersonating a villain whose larynx Fox has just damaged in a fight. There's lots of other tense mixed-gender combat for which Paterson manages complete vocal control so that no one gets lost in the scuffle. M.C. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine