Catch Me If You Can (If You Can Series , #1)

by Christina C Jones

[Berls]

3.5 stars
I don't read many of these kinds of books - with FBI agents and espionage - but I did enjoy this one and I think I would like to continue the series. I like the characters and I am interested to see where things go.

This is an enemies-to-lovers meets fake romance story - which are both among my favorite tropes. So that definitely worked for me. Naomi's character development was strong. She is a very complex character, who's dealing with a constant pull and push between her feelings for Marcus and the fear of letting her guard down/forgetting the job she's been focused on since she was a teen. And then you have Marcus; I was less impressed with his character development. He starts off a pretty straightforward "good guy" FBI agent, focused on closing cases and not really getting nuance IMO. By the end, he's emerged as someone who sees the gray area, and some things he's doing (spoiler territory) paints him a very different light. It was kind of whiplash for me, since we'd been getting his POV as well and never saw this.

The story has a nice pace, with a balance between romance (which gets sizzling!) and then the spy elements. There were some definite hold your breath moments and I'm very interested to see where things will end up. I'm also curious to see development of some of the other characters - there were some surprise twists near the end that I think could result in some very interesting story lines.

I listened to Catch Me If You Can, which was dual narrated by Leon Nixon and Wesleigh Siobhan. I thought they complimented each other well, with no real disconnect when the chapters switched POV/narrators. They both delivered consistent voices and I enjoyed listening at 2x speed. I do think that Leon Nixon's narration for Naomi produced a stronger feeling of the characters being African American than Wesleigh Siobhan's narration did, but that was the only significant difference. I will happily listen to them both again in future books (assuming they continue narrating the series).