What the Bride Didn't Know

By: Kelly Hunter

Narrated by: India Plum

Length: 4 hrs and 57 mins

Publisher's summary

Shh...it's a secret!

Special ops expert Trig Sinclair is a man's man, and that means he knows the cardinal rule of the bro code-no matter how dynamite Lena West is, as his best friend's younger sister, she's strictly off-limits!

But when a secret mission to Istanbul sees Lena and Trig pretending to be married (and sharing a bed!), he finds himself in a whole new world of sweet torture.... But if Trig thinks playing the honor-bound hero is tough, it's got nothing on how Lena feels when she discovers what her "groom" is really hiding....

©2013 Kelly Hunter (P)2013 Audible, Inc.

Sweet and descriptive.

Exactly what I expected and wanted! Easy listening that lulls you into Europe, intertwining a love story with suspense! Read it!!

Good not great

Could have had more leading up to the accident I got lost and had to keep going back

This was not a good story for me.

I also had problems with the audiobook narrator.

HERE’S THE SETUP:
Lena is traveling with Trig. She is mugged. They take her wallet. She is unconscious. Trig tells the hospital that she is his wife so they will quickly treat her and talk to him about it. She is not his wife. They are friends.

MOST OF THE STORY (with sort of Spoilers, but they are predictable due to the romance formula):
Lena has selective amnesia and asks Trig all kinds of questions about their marriage and relationship. Trig tries to do the honorable thing and not have sex with her until she regains her memory. But Lena insists on kissing and seducing him. She also makes him buy wedding rings saying it will help her memory. She insists that he get down on his knees and give her the proposal speech again. She asks questions like: Do you love me? Did we often have fights? What was sex like for us? She talks about the kind of house they should buy and their future kids. Then there is the predictable-big-separation-conflict when she regains her memory. She is angry with Trig saying you lied to me, you let me make a fool of myself. So she leaves him. Then she grieves and misses him and is lonely.

THERE IS NO PLOT OUTSIDE THE ABOVE:
The book blurb mentioned special ops and a secret mission to Istanbul, so I thought romantic suspense. But it’s not. The plot was supposed to be about finding Lena’s missing brother Jared. There was no action or development of that. It was solved with phone calls.

MY OPINION:
Most of the book was during her amnesia. It was not interesting. The conflicts were predictable. You knew there would be conflict when her memory returned. You need to suspend disbelief because Trig should have told her they were not married early on, but he didn’t. She was not in a precarious medical situation. She could have handled the truth because she was so pushy with so many other things. No fragility there.

AUDIOBOOK NARRATOR:
I had two problems with India Plum. 1. She spoke in a bland-dull-flat-tone, like she was bored. 2. She has a heavy Australian accent. It’s interesting to hear, but I often found myself thinking about how she said things instead of what she said. The accent was hard for me, but it might be ok for others.

Narrative mode: 3rd person.
Genre: contemporary romance, amnesia.