Shameless

Tropical Adventure Series, Book 3

By: Steven Becker, David F. Berens, Chris Niles, Douglas Pratt

Narrated by: Paul J. McSorley

Length: 4 hrs and 46 mins

Publisher's summary

A father’s worst nightmare….

Harvey Thackerson lost his wife to a seemingly random car accident and now his teenage daughter has gone missing in the Florida Keys.

When he decides to leave everything behind to find her, he discovers things about her past that he and his wife never knew. She may be in bigger danger than he thought.

Hold on tight, as Shameless sets sail on a tumultuous thrill ride through the Florida Keys. Written in four parts by four best-selling Tropical Authors, the story plunges Harvey into the worlds of each author's characters in a desperate search for his daughter.

Whether you're new to these fan favorites, or an old friend along for the ride, you'll love seeing them band together in this tropical action and adventure thriller:

Troy Bodean is a coastal rambler drifting from beach to beach with murder and mayhem all around. While he’s just looking for a tropical place to settle down and call home, he runs into trouble at every stop on the way.

Check out the Troy Bodean Tropical Thriller series to find out what Troy’s getting into next.

Kate Kingsbury, a dive instructor with a knack for finding things, just wants to work on her ancient houseboat or go kayaking with her retired police dog, Whiskey. But when trouble washes ashore on her beloved Shark Key, she and her marina family will risk everything to make the world right again.

Jump into Kate’s non-stop thrill-ride with the Shark Key Adventure Series.

Chase Gordon, a former Marine makes his home on board his 40-foot sailboat, Carina. When he's not working as a part-time bartender, he's a full-time boat bum finding trouble in all kinds of places.

Grab your gear and come aboard for fast-paced adventure.

Mac Travis. Laying low is something he thought he would excel at. He wouldn’t be the first —or the last—to come to the Florida Keys to escape his past. What could have been never seems to happen to Mac as he is pulled into one adventure after another.

A wild ride of boating, salvage, and fishing with a strong dose of Keys counterculture. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

©2023 Down Island Press (P)2023 Steven Becker, David Berens, Christine Niles, Douglass Pratt, Tropical Authors

enjoyed the twists in this one

some of the writers sure had fun in the handoffs, lots of twists and turns in this action packed thriller, sure worked good for 4 writers in unison.

Interesting Story & Intro to Certain Characters

3.5 out of 5 stars

This is the third book I’ve read in the Tropical Adventures series. This one was the first one where I wasn’t familiar with the characters. I’ve featured most of the authors in my New and Notable posts over the years because their stories sound interesting. I love being able to, pardon the water pun… dip my toes into the stories like this. I know Shameless covers one story, but it features each author’s characters and writing styles. I like that it feels like one cohesive piece with a few outliers in the scenes and dialogue.

The story itself was excellent and one that I found myself wanting to dig more and more into as it progressed. I was worried when they would utilize the adoption as part of the drama/intrigue here – but I thought they worked around it well and used it and the WitSec part to their advantage instead of as a crutch.

I like to tiptoe around narrators a bit, but I have to call out a few concerns I had. Now, I say this, having read the whole story and only ever sort of doing the dog head tilt a few times in the beginning. Paul J. McSorley is a Canadian narrator. I don’t even have to look that up to confirm it. There were quite a few scenes where he’d use the Canadian pronunciation of words. But the beginning (basically the entire book’s first part) was a bit hard to get into. I think McSorley was trying too hard to use his “girl voice” and ended up, somehow, sounding more Canadian. It does seem to even out as the story progresses, but this was the first time that I felt like a narrator pulled me out of a story at times, and being an honest reviewer, I had to call it out. It’s something that McSorley can use to his advantage. Still, he may want to work on thinning out his accent a bit if he’s going to be playing believable American characters roaming around the Florida Keys. One other call out here (sorry, Paul), but I just wanted to say that there were a few times that he overacted some of the characters and made them hard to understand. I know exactly why he did this, but there’s a fine line between acting and overacting – and a few of the characters with long drawls or “mumble-like” speech patterns that were hard to hear/understand.

To be honest with anyone who made it this far, I wanted to call all of this out. The issues I mentioned did not detract from my enjoyment of the story. It just caught me off guard a bit. I thought that Shameless was an excellent teaser into the writing styles of these four Tropical authors, and honestly, I plan on adding more of them to my queue (my TBR pile whines at this).

Not so much for me

I loved the first 2 books, Graceless and Timeless but Shameless not so much. I think that in the first 2 books I knew all the characters as I have read all of the authors books but in Shameless I hadn't read any of the authors and that may have been my downfall with this book. I didn't care for the segue between the different authors in this book. So shame on me I guess for not having read the author's works prior to this but it just wasn't that interesting to me and I didn't have any knowledge of the characters. Also, the narration was just so-so and I really didn't like the Boston accent - it would have been better to just not do it at all. Oh well - others may really enjoy the book; just an observation that knowing my characters makes it more enjoyable as you get to know them better and better with each book.