A contract killer adopts an eight-year-old in the opening movement of this audiobook, and the museum job does not get moving until he has worked out what to do with her while he works. AJ Sherwood's first Unholy Trifecta novel runs nine hours and twenty-one minutes in Iggy Toma's reading, published by Podium Audio in 2022, and the collision in that premise is the whole design: a man whose life plan was shoot people, get money, see his friends, revised by a child on a dark street in Memphis who hands him her pocket change and asks for help.
Sequence matters here more than it does in most capers. Ari acquires a daughter first and a job second, which means the heist plot arrives already carrying weight. Carter Harrison, a mercenary, needs Ari's particular expertise to get inside the Knowles, a museum with serious security, and steal back a Monet water lily painting. The job needs more people than the two of them. It also needs Ari to solve a problem no thriller protagonist normally has, which is who watches the kid.
What the response column loved most was not the theft. The May 2022 note, five stars, lists its affections in order and the romance comes third: first the father-daughter relationship, then the friendship, then the love story. It singles out Remi as a character the whole cast takes to immediately, and it is warm about Ari's criminal circle in particular, praising Kyou's deadpan wit and Ivan's habit of doing whatever he feels like. That ranking is a fair guide to what the book is actually about, and anyone arriving purely for the romance should know that ordering in advance.
Tone is what holds the two halves together, and the description sets it in the opening line: not stealing if you are stealing it back. That register, larceny treated as a slightly cheeky moral category, runs through the whole book and decides whether the domestic plot reads as touching or as evasive. Ari kills people for money, the narrative likes him anyway, and the novel never pretends to resolve the contradiction. Anyone who needs a lead redeemed by the final chapter should know the book has no interest in that project.
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Casting a single narrator across this cast is a real ask. An eight-year-old, a laconic sniper, a crew of criminals with distinct comic registers and two men circling each other for most of the runtime all have to be distinguishable by voice alone, and comic timing has to survive alongside the tenderness without either undercutting the other. The one note on this page that touches the recording, four stars in May 2025, calls the book entertaining, silly, heartfelt and a feel-good story, observes that it works fine as a standalone, and then adds that the audio is great. Brief, but it is direct testimony from someone who pressed play.
Standalone status is worth underlining, since the series field marks this as the first of three and a later response mentions buying both sequels immediately. Nothing here requires prior reading, and the ending resolves. The trilogy structure is an invitation rather than a cliffhanger, which is not always true of romance series openers.
Nine hours and twenty minutes is also a well-judged length for this kind of story. Long enough for the slow burn to actually burn, short enough that the caper does not sag in the middle, and neatly divisible into a few evenings. The tonal mix, criminal competence undercut by domestic chaos, holds up better in sustained sessions than it would in ten-minute fragments, because the jokes tend to pay off scenes rather than lines.
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Content expectations are set most precisely by a June 2023 note, which opens with a straightforward tag list: M/M, new relationship, explicit, morally gray, slow burn, found family, and a child in the mix. That entry also flags the structural consequence of the slow burn, noting the love interest does not turn up early, before its own text runs out mid-word. Buyers who want the romance front and center should recalibrate. Buyers who object to explicit content have been warned by a reader rather than by the listing, which does not carry that flag anywhere.
Remi is the other thing to weigh. A November 2019 note raises the obvious objection and then answers it, saying she reads as more mature than a standard eight-year-old, and adding from apparent experience that children who have come through abuse of the kind described often do. Whether that reconciliation works for you is personal. The child's backstory involves neglect and abuse, and while the book handles her recovery as its emotional center rather than as spectacle, the material is present from the first chapter.
Classification on the listing is misleading in one small way. The tag reads Action and Adventure, which describes perhaps a third of the book. This is a romance with a heist attached, filed under a label that suggests the reverse, and the description's only signal about the central relationship is a closing line about handling a sexy mercenary. Readers browsing by category may arrive expecting a different novel.
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Found family is the trope this book exists to serve, and it builds the trope around characters who genuinely are criminals rather than misunderstood ones. Ensemble comedy is the second draw, since the supporting crew carries a great deal of the pleasure. Anyone who finds a hardened professional comprehensively defeated by parenting logistics funny will be well served too, because that joke runs for most of the runtime without wearing thin.
Explicit content is the first disqualifier, closely followed by a child recovering from abuse, which is not something everyone wants to spend nine hours near. A tight procedural heist is the second thing this will not deliver, because the museum job shares the book with a domestic plot and frequently loses to it. Slow burn is the last hurdle: the romance takes its time by design, and anybody who arrived for the romance will spend the opening stretch waiting.
Quick Take
- Voice: Iggy Toma works alone across a cast that runs from an eight-year-old to a deadpan criminal crew, and one four-star response signs off by calling the audio great.
- Big ideas: found family, morally gray protagonists, slow-burn M/M romance, an art heist with a childcare problem
- Atmosphere: Warm, wisecracking, surprisingly tender
- Worth it?: A crime caper whose real engine is parenthood, and the rare romance where the child is a character rather than a device.
Can you listen to this audiobook without reading the rest of the Unholy Trifecta series?
Yes. The series field marks it as book one of Unholy Trifecta, and the central plot resolves inside these nine hours. Nothing in the setup assumes prior reading, since Ari, Remi and the crew are all introduced from scratch. The later volumes are an invitation rather than a requirement.
How explicit is the romance in this audiobook?
Expect on-page sex, arriving well into the runtime rather than early. The listing carries no content flag of its own, and the description signals the central relationship only through a closing line about handling a sexy mercenary. Treat that silence as a gap in the metadata rather than as reassurance.
Is the child character handled well?
Remi carries far more weight than the premise implies. She is introduced handing a stranger her pocket change on a Memphis street, and the plot reorganizes around her instead of treating her as leverage. That she reads older than eight is the one recurring objection, and her backstory involves neglect and abuse.
Does the heist plot deliver?
It delivers, but it shares the book. The job involves getting into a high-security museum to take back a Monet, and it needs a larger crew than two people. Expect roughly equal time given to assembling that crew, the romance and Ari's domestic reorganization around a new daughter.
