Audiobook Review: Pent Up by Damon Suede

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Blurb:

PENT UP: Mix business with pleasure and take cover.

Ruben Oso moves to Manhattan to start his life over as a low-rent bodyguard and stumbles into a gig in a swanky Park Avenue penthouse. What begins as executive protection turns personal working for a debonair zillionaire who makes Ruben question everything about himself.

Watching over financial hotshot Andy Bauer puts Ruben in an impossible position. He knows zero about shady trading and his cocky boss lives barricaded in a glass tower with wall-to-wall secrets and hot-and-cold-running paranoia. Can the danger be real? Is Andy for real?

What’s a bullet catcher to do? Ruben knows his emotions are out of control even as he races to untangle a high-priced conspiracy and his crazy feelings before somebody gets dead. If his suspicions are right, Andy will pay a price neither can afford, and Ruben may discover there’s no way to guard a heart. 

After becoming sober and getting divorced, Ruben decides to leave Florida and start a new life in New York with his brother. He moves into his brother's tiny apartment and takes a job with his brother's bodyguard company. And on his way to his first official day in the office, things get crazy and crazy continues to the end of the book. Seriously. This book is a crazy soap opera tale. I was confused through most of the book about what was happening.

Before I get into all the crazy, I was lost most of the time by Ruben. He kept referring to "bull's eye face" and I had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. Ruben definitely had a way of speaking that was uniquely his. He was vulgar, brash, bitter, a jerk, unlikable, annoying, homophobic, and depressing. Ruben was Latin but was raised in a family that prided itself on being American and denying their roots so he had no connection to his Latin heritage. I felt Ruben was derogatory about that culture and the many mentions of his brown skin. Andy was a rich guy, pretending to be whatever he thought he should be and most the time seemed to be playing a game that I had no understanding of. I never felt like I got to know him or understand him. But this story is told from Ruben's POV so that's to be expected. I actually found both MC's to be unlikable and never felt my opinion change.

The narrator of this story is Christopher Kipiniak. He had a good pace, and gave characters distinctive voices. I thought his voice for Ruben was gruff and gravely and his Andy voice was smarmy, exactly how they came across in the book. He had many characters for this story and he seemed to handle them well. He expressed the appropriate emotions throughout the story and didn't seem to have weird pauses in his sentences. To be fair to the narrator, I really didn't pay that much attention to his voice as I was so confused by the story and what was going on.

Some of my favorite books have been double GFY, so I was really interested in this book. I've only read one other book by this author, but he definitely has a raw, gritty style to writing and though I'm no delicate flower, maybe that's just a style that doesn't work for me. But, I know there are many people who are going to love it for this style. There is a mystery to this story, but truthfully, I was so confused by what was happening that I completely missed this part of it and didn't believe there really was a mystery. Maybe this is one of those books that I needed to read first, before listening to it since there's so much going on.

Overall: 3.5 Stars

Performance: 4 Stars

Story: 3 Stars