St. Nick

By: Alan Russell / Narrated By: Patrick Lawlor

Length: 8 hrs and 6 mins

BeYONd lovely. I mean, the kind of lovely that makes you happy when you sob Super Ugly Sobs!

I’m a sucker for good Christmas Listens, almost as much as I’m a sucker for blowing snot bubbles as I bray ugly sobs over well-written touches. I’m kinda sorta a pushover like that tho, I admit it.

Big Sis, however? Muuuuch tougher audience tho’ a muuuuuch softer heart. She edited my one and only novel; she edits these, m’ reviews over here on Audiobook Accomplice. Slice! Slash! Slice! Get to the heart of the words.

And anyhoo—one Christmas we had The Christmas Doll, and boy howdy did THAT one have us weeping, both of our very souls touched. So, man! has THAT one been a hard act to follow each Christmas. Still, we went into St. Nick knowing it had a cop in it, but also it had an engaging premise that we dearly hooooped would be hardboiled, yes, but alsoooo, dare we say it: Moving and heartwarming by the end?

Dude, cue the ugly crying, like, pretty much from the get-go and pretty much throughout the enTIRe danged thing.

Nick Pappas is a cop on suspension. An off-duty incident had him foiling a holdup, but also firing his firearm, and? A ricochet bullet hit an itty bitty girl, having him leaving the scene unsecured and racing to the ER as the little girl bled out. Sooo much blood in his memories, sooo many regrets.

So many nightmares.

And the press had a field day with him, portraying him as an outta control cop, drunk (One beer over the course of his evening), and with a gambling problem (His weekly poker game with friends saw him losing six lousy bucks). He has no job. He has no hope. And he eats his breakfast cereal with his gun poised at the corner of the table, always on hand should it all become too much, and he’s ready to put it to his head.

An ex-partner does Security at the local mall, and he calls Nick with a proposition. No, Nick answers without even hearing it. Pleeeease? There are thugs targeting shoppers, and the last mugging left the victim ready for the ICU!

Welllll, maaaaybe. Cuz, you see, Nick has a good sense of right and wrong.

Ooooone thing, his partner adds: You’ll be doing your mall stakeout as Jolly Old St. Nick.

NO WAY! Nick howls!

He’s suckered into doing it… for two shifts… the unbearably HOT suit, the squawking kids, his energetic and oh so happy Elf sidekick, Angie. -BUT- Now that he has his suit and his Ho Ho Ho’s down, he’s taking over Santa gigs by going to the local hospital to visit reeeeally sick children, and he’s answering all the letters that Santa’s received.

Through these unforeseen activities, Nick meets Raymond, a slightly cynical boy who’s critically ill and who likes Nick as Nick more than he does as a Helper of Santa. And Nick also receives a heart-twanging letter from a little girl named Laura who begs him NOT to forget her this year… like he did last Christmas.

There’s sooo much more to St. Nick than what I’m saying here, and author Alan Russell makes the smartest story-crafting decisions imaginable. There are so many times he coulda gone for the easy or cheesy scene, but he refrains from that. There’s the sliiiiightest bit of romance, but it in no way overwhelms, and that little boy, Raymond? Prepare to sob even tho’ of COURSE you KNOW how that’s going to/gotta end.

What got me was the sloooow morphing of personality and soul-growth for Nick. The gun stays on his table throughout the story cuz Life ain’t kind, it never is. Plus, the people around him are fully fleshed-out individuals who have oooodles of pain in their own lives. Christmas cheer? It’s hard-earned, baby. You have to choose it over utter agony.

Patrick Lawlor did a stellar job, and even tho’ at first I kept hearing the beginning of Silent Heroes, I soon stopped hearing the gunfire of Vietnam and came to hear a good man in pain, one a tad hyper-vigilant, one who every now and again made the right choice at the right time. A man who was willing to love even if it meant disappointment, heartache, and tears of pain raining down his face in sheer joy as well. Lawlor, whose voice for the ex-partner was a tad, well, ear-splitting at first, comes into his own. And during our discussion, I found it rather hiLARious that Big Sis views the audio Samples with just as Squid’s-ish an Eye as I do the Publisher’s Summaries: They are OFTEN misleading! And she was a bit hesitant based on Lawlor’s choice of voice for the ex-partner… but hey! as ya listened along, as the story unfolded, as the characters were developed, it wound up being the spot-on decision it needed to be, so Bravo, Lawlor.

Just beautifully, beautifully done! I’d purchased Russell’s “Gideon and Sirius” novels, had listened to the first two, enjoyed them, then I went all “Squirrel!” on the third as I really wasn’t into Mysteries at the time. But I gotta tell ya: Nothing in those books prepared me for how well Russell could write, for just how brilliant his choices would be, for how much, how very very much I would swallow down an increasingly-present lump in m’ throat, how often I’d be swiping away tears.

-Or-

for how sad, how very happy that ending made me.

Listen again next Christmas?

You betcha.

Cuz every year? Every Christmas?

Oh, ya GOTTA have your heart chipped away… or else ‘tain’t Christmas at all…