When Cora attends her sister’s birthday party, she expects at most a hangover or a walk of shame. She doesn’t anticipate a stolen wallet, leaving her stranded and dependent on Dean—her arch nemesis and ultimate thorn in her side.
Still Beating
And she really doesn’t anticipate waking up in shackles in a madman’s basement.
To make matters worse, Dean shares the space in his own set of chains.
After fifteen years of teasing, insults, and practical jokes, the ultimate joke seems to be on them. The two people who always thought they’d end up killing each other must now work together if they want to survive.
But Cora and Dean have no idea their abductor has a plan for them. A plan that will alter the course of their relationship, blur the line between hate and love, and shackle them together with far more than just chains.
When Your Worst Enemy Becomes Your Lifeline
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💙💛💚❤️
Chemistry: 🧪🧪🧪🧪
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘📙📔
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏🌍
Character development: 😋🙂😁😘
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration type: Dual Narration
Character Backgrounds and Plot Summary
Still Beating was nothing like what I expected from the blurb. I went into this thinking the kidnapping would be the central story, but the three weeks Cora and Dean spend imprisoned together are really only the beginning of what this book is about.
Cora and Dean have known each other for fifteen years, and they have spent almost all of that time antagonizing each other. Dean is engaged to Cora’s sister, Mandy, and Cora is supposed to be Mandy’s maid of honor. Their relationship is full of pranks, insults, and years of resentment. Cora even blames Dean for contributing to the breakup of her previous long-term relationship. So, when her wallet is stolen at Mandy’s birthday celebration and she is stranded at 2 a.m., calling Dean for a ride is pretty much her worst option.
Of course, that ride home becomes a nightmare. They are stopped by someone pretending to be a police officer and kidnapped by a serial killer. Chained in a basement, starved, threatened, and subjected to horrific abuse, Cora and Dean have no choice but to depend on one another. One of the most disturbing parts for me was watching Dean being forced into something neither of them wanted, because the situation made it painfully clear that he was being victimized too.
What surprised me most was how much of the book happens after they escape. Their shared experience changes everything. They understand each other’s nightmares, panic, guilt, and reactions in a way that Mandy, their families, and their friends simply cannot. The story spends a lot of time showing that surviving the basement does not mean they are suddenly okay.
Highlights and Limitations
The strongest part of this story for me was the bond that develops between Cora and Dean during captivity. These two people who spent fifteen years trying to get under each other’s skin suddenly become each other’s only source of comfort. Their conversations, memories, and small attempts to keep each other sane were some of the most emotionally effective scenes for me.
I also appreciated that the PTSD and aftermath were not swept aside once they were rescued. Dean’s guilt and shame, Cora’s nightmares and difficulty feeling safe, and the ways they both struggle to function afterward made their recovery feel like an ongoing process rather than something that disappeared because they were home.
Mandy was probably the character who frustrated me the most. can also see things from Mandy’s point of view as she was with Dean in a relationship for fifteen years. There were times I wanted her to be the bad guy, and she was a bit too dismissive of what her sister and boyfriend went through at the hands of the serial killer, at one point she even expects Dean to get over his trauma quicker, saying he was only held captive for three weeks. Though both Dean and Cora had a lot of love for Mandy, and it is much easier to see that there were fractures in his relationship with her from the outside, like the fact that they were just going to get married after being together for fifteen years, they didn’t even live together and Dean had admitted some other things while he was being held with Cora. At the same time, I could see why she felt betrayed, and that made the situation more complicated than simply making her the villain.
My biggest issue was the speed with which some of Cora and Dean’s romantic relationship develops after such an extreme trauma. I understood why they felt uniquely connected, but there were moments when I wanted the book to slow down and spend even more time on their individual healing before pushing their relationship forward.
Narration
Laurie West and Christian Black were a good pairing for this story. With the audiobook using dual first-person perspectives, having separate narrators for Cora and Dean made it easier to follow whose head I was in, particularly as the story moved between the captivity and aftermath portions.
The emotional material also requires narrators who can handle fear, vulnerability, anger, guilt, and intimacy without making every scene sound melodramatic. Both narrators gave the characters room to sound shaken and emotionally exhausted when the story called for it. I especially liked having Dean’s perspective voiced separately because his guilt and emotional fallout are such an important part of his character.
Final Opinion
Still Beating was a difficult audiobook for me to listen to, but it was also much more emotionally layered than I expected. I went in expecting a dark kidnapping romance and came away thinking much more about trauma, survivor’s guilt, complicated family relationships, and what happens when two people are the only ones who truly understand what the other has experienced.
Cora and Dean’s relationship is messy, uncomfortable, and at times frustrating, but I cared about what happened to them. I especially liked that the story did not end when they escaped the basement. Their freedom was only the beginning of another kind of struggle.
This is absolutely a book where the trigger warnings matter. The kidnapping, sexual violence, PTSD, suicidal thoughts, and other traumatic material are intense. It is not an easy romance, but despite some choices I questioned, Cora and Dean’s journey stayed with me long after I finished listening.
