FRUIT FLY, appropriation is appropriation, and it's always wrong

FRUIT FLY
JOSH SILVER
Crooked Lane Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$14.99 ebook, available now

The Independent Press Top 40 Bestsellers: Fiction For the week ending September 16, 2026

Rating: 4.25* of five

The Publisher Says: Go gay. Go sad. Go dark.
A washed-up author will stop at nothing to claw her way back to relevancy—even if it means appropriating a young gay man’s tragic story.

Mallory Maddox is buried under seven years of writer’s block. With her status as a literary sensation fizzling, she’ll do anything she can to resurrect her career. Inspiration needs to strike—and fast.

Enter Leo. He’s a struggling addict sleeping under bridges and trading sex for survival. He’s vulnerable. He’s enigmatic. He’s exactly what Mallory has been looking for.

Mallory needs Leo if she wants another bestseller. The world needs Leo’s story right now, and Mallory believes she deserves to tell it. Really, it’s her story—she’s the one who wrote it, after all.

But as secrets threaten to unravel more than just her career, Mallory must decide how far she will go to pen the perfect story.

A razor-sharp satirical thriller, Fruit Fly will appeal to fans of R. F. Kuang’s Yellowface and Yomi Adegoke’s The List.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Mallory appropriates a person's life story because she needs a bestseller. His story is plangently told for sympathy tears because he's been used hard and thrown aside by an uncaring world, left to rot under bridges without housing and unable to access needed treatment for his addictions. Mallory extracts Leo's story by telling lies and faking an identity aimed at piquing Leo's interest in targeting the fake for exploitation, trading sex for cash along the way. Then the really ugly fake begins...her impersonation of a therapist who will help Leo.

Because Mallory needs a bestselling novel idea that she can turn around quickly.

It's hard to overstate the ick that gave me as I read it in the synopsis, except to say it only gets worse as the story itself unfolds. I do mean "unfolds" as the stories of Mallory and Leo are multilayered and coming to light in slow steps, complementing each others' past traumas and shared senses of betrayal.

The language of therapy can hide as easily as it can reveal; the way one uses the techniques involved in therapy do not in and of themselves lead directly to miraculous healing. In these characters' case, neither separately and never the two together are using anything to do more than temporarily and incredibly facilely cope with genuine, terrible traumas. Neither is introspective by nature. You can't fuck for a living and be doing a whole lot of drugs to get it done and still feel on top of your emotional damage; and any writer who can't overcome writers' block by looking inward to see *why* instead of outward to see *what* as a reflex action is deeply, deeply damaged and needs lots of help.

The pair are entangled in a complicated system of interlocking denial told in their own separate voices...always wise to let the perp and the victim have equal access to the reader's attention. It's a loud response to the terrible A Little Life, shifting its ripping and tearing of emotions into bleeding gobbets into clumsy and careless slicing at cancerous infected flesh. It hasn't helped but it is the action that, with guidance, will help as opposed to the lethal wrongness of that other story.

What happens, though, is that the finger-wagging title...y'all know what a fruit fly is in gay circles, right?...and the darkly judgmental tone of her engagement with Leo wears on one's nerves as it drips out in unceasing small, acidic drops. These are not kind people to themselves or others so the novel's length works against it. Yes, I know more details of how terrible each of them is, but really? Do I genuinely need to know this much?

I was also informed the story had thriller elements but I'm not sure what they were. I can get behind a mystery definition of the read because it's a mystery to me why Mallory's husband is still alive and has his balls attached (he's pushing for a kid, so they gotta be there). It's also a mystery why Leo thought he was using Mallory as she strip-mined his life for usable raw materials in several guises; that's a shocking absence of street savvy for someone who makes a living turning tricks.

I found a certain wry amusement in reading the stories because I felt in on the joke, but that was tempered by the very clear and unsparing depictions of abuse and violence and self-harming ideation. It's done plainly, in adequate metaphorical lighting that enables we-the-reader to see the actions and activities without questioning "is that what I think it is?" Yep. It is. The authorial tone is quite unemphatically reporting what is really occurring. That's a virtue, it deprives the pearl-clutchers of their favorite line of criticism: sensationalized overblown etc etc.

It just goes on that little bit too long to be my personal ideal read. Maybe it'll be yours.

PRECIOUS FRIENDS: Murder in Sag Harbor, and one uses "friends" advisedly for most of these old queens!

PRECIOUS FRIENDS: Murder in Sag Harbor (Angelo Perrotta Mysteries #3)
FRANK SPINELLI
Level Best Books (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$6.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: The Most Precious Friends Hide the Darkest Secrets

"In the Hamptons, interlopers are as ubiquitous as deer ticks. The only way to remove one is to apply steady, even pressure on the head and pull."

JB Pulaski, a tenured sociology professor, thought surviving cancer was his greatest battle. Now, desperate to save his crumbling marriage, he retreats to his Sag Harbor summer home with his philandering husband Mike and teenage son Emilio.

Instead, he finds humiliation.

When Mike begins a public affair with Italian pianist Gianni Cuomo, JB becomes the summer's most whispered-about scandal—the cuckolded husband everyone pities but no one respects. But when Gianni is found murdered at an exclusive costume party, pity transforms into suspicion, and JB becomes the prime suspect.

Behind the gated driveways and manicured lawns lies a world where appearances are everything and loyalty is currency. As the investigation closes in, JB must confront not only a conspiracy designed to destroy him, but the darkness he's spent a lifetime suppressing. With his son's future hanging in the balance and his own violent impulses emerging, JB discovers that in the Hamptons, the most dangerous predators wear the most beautiful masks.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Angelo, the ostensible series character, turns Poirot on us and shows up once in a while to talk his buddy JB down from a ledge, or out of a corner, as his life unravels in the course of a murder investigation.

He's the prime suspect in the drowning death of the latest paramour seduced by his cheatin' dirtbag of a husband, Mike. Angelo can't get involved, obvs, because literally no one would trust his findings. And it helps nothing that JB's a recent recipient of chemo, which kicked more than his cancer: he's emotionally disregulated enough to have chased off another boy Mike was sexin' up by claiming (falsley?) to have been involved in previous suspicious deaths occurring in Sag Harbor. As that's happening, someone ups the emotional ante by threatening Mike and JB's college-age son Emilio.

Solid, sudsy stuff!

It's less Angelo than JB, and Rakesh his bestie pouring martinis for everyone. (Even Rakesh's alcoholic husband whose name I forget because I dislike him, not a great look there Rakesh. Also, lotsa lotsa names.) It felt like a gay version of Dynasty it was so seriously glam-80s evening soap. I was hugely entertained. I was pretty sure I knew who was behind the campaign to ruin JB and Mike's marriage and family. I was wrong. Mitigating my embarrassment, I mention again the large cast of characters, all with petty-to-powerful secrets...like Dynasty, but all openly (or not) gay.

I got this DRC first, before I knew it was ostensibly part of a series; it impacted my ability or desire to invest in the tale being told not at all. The characters are all fleshed out in this story to the extent they can be; I'm not going to pretend it's flawless, but the proper people end up in the proper beds.

Oh, beds: this is not a steamy story, so do't go in expecting that. It's terrific if what you want is some fun storytelling that keeps you thinking about how easy a thing it is to lose your reputation, and how seldom it has much to do with you. I think fun like this is worth every bit of your time and treasure committed to it.

FIRE ON THE ISLAND: A Romantic Thriller, Greek-American gay sleuth in the homeland & THE FOURTH COURIER, end-of-Cold-War spyjinks story

FIRE ON THE ISLAND: A Romantic Thriller
TIMOTHY JAY SMITH
Arcade Crimewise (NON-AFFILIATE Amazon link
$2.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: For lovers of crime fiction and the allure of the Greek islands, Fire on the Island is the perfect summer read.

FIRE ON THE ISLAND is a playful, romantic thriller set in contemporary Greece, with a gay Greek-American FBI agent, who is undercover on the island to investigate a series of mysterious fires. Set against the very real refugee crisis on the beautiful, sun-drenched Greek islands, this novel paints a loving portrait of a community in crisis. As the island residents grapple with declining tourism, poverty, refugees, family feuds, and a perilously damaged church, an arsonist invades their midst.

Nick Damigos, the FBI agent, arrives on the island just in time to witness the latest fire and save a beloved truffle-sniffing dog. Hailed as a hero and embraced by the community, Nick finds himself drawn to Takis, a young bartender who becomes his primary suspect, which is a problem because they're having an affair. Theirs is not the only complicated romance in the community and Takis isn't the only suspicious character on the island. Nick has to unravel the truth in time to prevent catastrophe, as he comes to terms with his own past trauma. In saving the village, he will go a long way toward saving himself.

A long time devotee of the Greek islands, Smith paints the setting with gorgeous color and empathy, ushering in a new romantic thriller with the charm of Zorba the Greek while shedding bright light on the very real challenges of life in contemporary Greece.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: The main thing a person wants in a beach read is escape, right? A chance to see something new and different in the world while baking on a sandy stretch of not-my-problem, with a little light romance/sex tossed (!) in for fun. And here it is, laddies and gentlewomen: The prescription substance for your beach-read needs.

Nick is our sort-of PoV character, though I think the novel's fairly ensemble-cast-y. He provides the action that solves the problems, so it's not unfair to promote him to centrality. He's a Greek-American settled in Athens, where he does Greek-themed stuff for the FBI. Considering how important Greece is to many and various criminal enterprises within the US, this didn't raise my eyebrows. The situation in which Nick arrives...an active refugee crisis, a local problem with criminal arson, a subplot of Russian-mafia troubles...was, then, one in which I could certainly imagine US federal law enforcement taking enough of an interest to send someone to monitor.

I'm a little more skeptical about Nick's open gayness. Not so much in Greece...the history's there, and the Greek townspeople's homophobia isn't over- or under-played...but in the FBI. Gayness within the federal law enforcement establishment isn't surprising but its openness is to me. I suspended disbelief on the subject because I could simply be behind the times and am most certainly sour and suspicious of all law enforcement personnel.

That said, those were my principal struggles with the book's set-up; its delivery of them, and of the remaining elements of the plot, was most agreeably deft and disarming. I knew from the start that the idea of the village was to offer the storyteller a pressure cooker. The Greece-to-Australia pipeline is well and truly attested for generations now, and plays a large part here in this story. The ways Author Smith brought the connection to life were sneaky and very nicely executed, having the desired effect of making the guilt of Nick's local fling Takis look inevitable while making sure that he couldn't really be guilty. (You'll work that out in mere moments when the means of linking Takis to the crimes is presented.) So, while it plays out, enjoy the mummery. Likewise Nick, the scion of Greek emigrants, is treading a well-worn real-world path from Greece to Baltimore and back again. The refugee crisis is horribly real. Its dreadful, cruel scope isn't even as severe in the story as in reality. The ongoing Greek debt crisis is presented but not explored because, honestly, would you rather read about a sexy young guy setting his sights on a silver fox and then bedding him, or microeconomic consequences of predatory capitalism?

Me neither. And, for the ewww-ick homophobes, the sex is not explicit or more than sketched in. Perfect beach-read level sexytimes, with plenty of happy coupling left to the adult relationship veteran's inner eye. What sex wasn't pleasant to view to one's inner eye was the sadder-but-wiser loss of virginity for a teen girl, an event she precipitates and, while it was happening, realizes is pretty damned disappointing. She doesn't leave the experience with good feelings about it. She also realizes what her own responsibilities in the situation are when it threatens to run her true love's course into a brick wall. Luckily she's a sensible person and makes very sure to exert her quite considerable will towards the resolution she wants to bring about. I was pleased that she was both a teenager...moody, nasty, angry as hell about whatever it is that makes teens so angry...and a burgeoning adult, with a clear goal she sets when things are at their most bewilderingly loud. I liked her for that trait.

Her mother and grandparents have a surprising connection to the arsons that bring Nick to the island. Her family's Australian connection and resultant outsiderdom are played for some clear plot advantages. The family isn't as outside as they feel themselves to be. The village, in fact, doesn't come out of the arsons and the other terrible crimes that occur while Nick is there entirely unchanged. The problems Nick knew were festering and which his mere presence were always going to lance were the sorts of issues that confront small, tight-knit communities the world over. In the end, Nick's actions in pursuit of solutions are as well-aimed at the dark and ugly past as at the creepy present.

While I liked that aspect of the story, I think I might've liked Nick a lot more for his characterization than his actions. He's in the early stages of midlife. He's got a terrible, nightmarish trauma in his past that he doesn't like to reveal. As it has physical marks on his body, he's reluctant to be as slutty as most gay characters in beach reads are (goddesses please bless their anti-gravity underwear). His body dysmorphia comes from literal scarring events, and it's shown as being truly troubling for Nick to confront. Takis is the agent of his reassessment of the problem. It is shown that Takis is singularly uninterested in Nick's scars and quite empathetic with his scarring. That was a very nice side-show in their passionate seasonal fling.

I also particularly resonated with the fact that everyone from the island is shown as possessing a very solid motivation for their actions, and those motivations (dark or bright) were delineated in enough detail that I could make them part of my response to the tale as a whole. I think the author's investment of time in revealing the town's traumas caused and endured paid off...even the revelation of the arsonist led to the revelation of the motives and the sheer awfulness of Hatred, that dark miasma clouding the haters' ability to see the essential sameness of all human beings. It was well handled. I didn't condone the actions that led to the actions I didn't condone, which matryoshka-doll of a response is far more complex than most beach-read thrillers I've read over the years.

But there are no perfect experiences in this, our life, are there. I wasn't really impressed with the handling of the art-forgery subplot. and its blatant gaudy obviousness. I was moved, and saddened, by the reasons for arsonist's tricks. I wasn't at all impressed that the consequences were so severe for the present-day crimes and not equally severe for those that motivated them in the first place. I was very amused with the by-play between Takis and Nick, the way they make what can only be a season's romance into something both fun and important to them both. I suppose a door was left open at the end for them to reconnect but it was pretty heavily deterministically set down as "nevermore." A bit less of a hammerblow to the gauzy soft-focus desire for A Happy Ending to their happy endings wouldn't have come amisss, and as it was felt more like the author was caving in to pressure to close down that Happy Ending.

None of these are deal-breakers, I hasten to add. I want to read more Timothy Jay Smith stories and I can definitely recommend this one to you for your beach reading pleasure.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE FOURTH COURIER
TIMOTHY JAY SMITH
Arcade Crimewise
$24.99 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: For International Espionage Fans of Alan Furst and Daniel Silva, a new thriller set in post-Soviet era Poland.

It is 1992 in Warsaw, Poland, and the communist era has just ended. A series of grisly murders suddenly becomes an international case when it's feared that the victims may have been couriers smuggling nuclear material out of the defunct Soviet Union. The FBI sends an agent to help with the investigation. When he learns that a Russian physicist who designed a portable atomic bomb has disappeared, the race is on to find him—and the bomb—before it ends up in the wrong hands.

Smith’s depiction of post-cold war Poland is gloomily atmospheric and murky in a world where nothing is quite as it seems. Suspenseful, thrilling, and smart, The Fourth Courier brings together a straight white FBI agent and gay black CIA officer as they team up to uncover a gruesome plot involving murder, radioactive contraband, narcissistic government leaders, and unconscionable greed.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Atmospheric, dark thriller about the immediate aftermath of the USSR's fall, its consequences for the former Warsaw Pact countries (especially Poland), and a morally ambiguous story of how the balance of power stays balanced.

I was unsurprised to see the homophobia of the Eastern Bloc countries brought into focus...remember Swimming in the Dark? Nationalist Love?...but was quite surprised to see it used to make a US spy into a honey trap for a General known to be, um, susceptible. It's such a realpolitik maneuver that I've always assumed it was simply unknown. Silly me. If something can provide leverage, of course it's been used by both sides.

Kurt, our gay character, is both Black and a CIA honey trap for the self-loathing General. He's...fine with it. He uses his body, its beauty and power, to further the interests of his chosen side. This means he's not a good gay, or a good guy. This being Reality I'm all down with this in theory. In practice, as it's handled in this story, it's a bit more like prostitution than it is noble self-sacrifice. I'm not criticizing here but analyzing what it is that the two things have in common: Exchange of value. The sheer mercenary chill of Kurt giving the General what he craves is perfectly appropriate, if distasteful.

Again, the consummation of the act isn't explicit. It's more detailed than it was in Fire on the Island. It's staged in a shower, and that made me chuckle...let's keep it clean, boys!...and the ending, which is indeed Happy, is somewhat heavy-handedly made into a political commentary. But I wasn't anywhere near as creeped out as I routinely am in these sorts of situations when it's a woman using her body to get a man to do something for her side. My primary issue is: That's it. That's what Kurt's there to do, he does it, and buh bye now!

As with all the gay characters in the book, they serve a role and vacate the scene when it's fulfilled. I found Jay, straight and narrow Jay, uninteresting really. He was an investigator who didn't investigate but ran across answers. It's not like that is unknown in thrillerdom. It just doesn't endear him to me. And honestly I just do not care about his ex-wife or about his borning relationship with Lilka the Polish lady, which yet again (see review above) is clearly stated as Not Going Anywhere.

Nowhere near as much fun to read as Fire on the Island, but I wanted to finish the read. I was involved, I was entertained, and yet still I was unsatisfied because Kurt was underutilized. Why tell me about him at all if all he was there to do was fuck one guy and then melt down the shower drain with his jizz?

I don't doubt that straight people will like it more than I did.

YES, DADDY is deeply affecting, upsetting, Queer, and dark...yay!

YES, DADDY
JONATHAN PARKS-RAMAGE
Harper Perennial
$16.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: A propulsive, scorching modern gothic, Yes, Daddy follows an ambitious young man who is lured by an older, successful playwright into a dizzying world of wealth and an idyllic Hamptons home where things take a nightmarish turn.

Jonah Keller moved to New York City with dreams of becoming a successful playwright, but, for the time being, lives in a rundown sublet in Bushwick, working extra hours at a restaurant only to barely make rent. When he stumbles upon a photo of Richard Shriver—the glamorous Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and quite possibly the stepping stone to the fame he craves—Jonah orchestrates their meeting. The two begin a hungry, passionate affair.

When summer arrives, Richard invites his young lover for a spell at his sprawling estate in the Hamptons. A tall iron fence surrounds the idyllic compound where Richard and a few of his close artist friends entertain, have lavish dinners, and—Jonah can’t help but notice—employ a waitstaff of young, attractive gay men, many of whom sport ugly bruises. Soon, Jonah is cast out of Richard’s good graces and a sinister underlay begins to emerge. As a series of transgressions lead inexorably to a violent climax, Jonah hurtles toward a decisive revenge that will shape the rest of his life.

Riveting, unpredictable, and compulsively readable, Yes, Daddy is an exploration of class, power dynamics, and the nuances of victimhood and complicity. It burns with weight and clarity—and offers hope that stories may hold the key to our healing.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: Gay people are, for better or worse, people. With the usual people-faults like greed and selfishness, the usual weaknesses like hunger for validation and sexual power. With the flaws hidden or simply not discussed, we're reduced to side characters in other people's stores; with them celebrated, we're back in the bad old days of Cruising or The Boys in the Band or...well, pick your poisonous fear-mongering. This is one of the reasons I liked Bath Haus despite my reservations about some of its elements.

This story? Those elements are dialed up to eleven, and then blown (!) up by even viler perpetrators! So...why is this a full-four-star review, given the (admittedly partial) CW list and the main character's self-destructive greed? I gave Bath Haus a little less than four full stars, after all.

The reason is simple, really. Because I want to and because it's my judgment.

What makes this reading experience so much more agreeable to me is the way I'm introduced to Jonah. From the very first pages of the book, there's nothing, not one thing, that happens in which you, the reader, can place simple trust. You know what's gone down, and you see it from a simple first-person point of view, narrated in second person to make the stakes inescapably clear. It's more effective in eliciting my sympathy than was the igniting event of Bath Haus so I was much more ready to put my crash helmet on and tighten up the buckles.

As we zig-zag through the darkening, increasingly menacing landscape of the story's world, no matter how high the gloss or hard the glitter, one can't forget the first pages and their stark warning not to accept anything at face value...given how many religious people there are in here, that's another clue. The simplest acts, the calmest words, all freighted with suspicion because you (narrator, reader) simply don't know which ones are lies and which ones are just...air. And there's an ending which, under almost any other regime, I'd be rattling my tin cup against my cage's bars to protest...but remember when I told you about the way Jonah is introduced to us? It's my thinking that the next act's curtain will rise soon.

When the story really reaches for darkness, really digs into the terrible truths of our society's seriously screwed-up power dynamics, it becomes a little less glib and surface-oriented, which serves the story well. It's not like we're going to be subjected to Thomas Piketty and Yanis Varoufakis lecturing us on the inherent abusiveness of capitalism. It *is* very much a carefully thought-out tale of what happens to people who, for a large variety of societally mandated reasons, simply don't matter and aren't protected. We're even granted a glimpse into the genesis of the imbalance in this particular pairing of men, Jonah and Richard, though it's not the main thrust (!) of the piece.

Bad sex puns aside, this is a very, very sexual story. It will not be for most straight readers. If #MeToo made you mad, this will make you even more mad because I can almost promise you this is more fact-based than you might think. It's really interesting that certain famous entertainment-industry older men are...silent...these days...and one wonders what's happening with the announced Amazon Studios streaming film in the past couple years.

The paperback version dropped this past Tuesday, so permaybehaps we'll get to see the darkness of Daddy on our screens before long. I'm not all the way sure I will be one of the early audience members. I will need to build up my courage to go back into this seriously scary, very well-crafted story universe.

THE REDSHIRT, Southern American football culture meets gay first love & BATH HAUS, gay thriller about unraveling your own life with plenty of help

BATH HAUS
P.J. VERNON
Doubleday Books
$26.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

FINALIST FOR THE 34th Lambda Literary Award—BEST LGBTQ Mystery! Winners announced 11 June 2022.

The Publisher Says: Oliver Park, a recovering addict from Indiana, finally has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving, wealthy partner in Nathan, a prominent DC trauma surgeon. Despite their difference in age and disparate backgrounds, they've made a perfect life together. With everything to lose, Oliver shouldn't be visiting Haus, a gay bathhouse. But through the entrance he goes, and it's a line crossed. Inside, he follows a man into a private room, and it's the final line. Whatever happens next, Nathan can never know. But then, everything goes wrong, terribly wrong, and Oliver barely escapes with his life.

He races home in full-blown terror as the hand-shaped bruise grows dark on his neck. The truth will destroy Nathan and everything they have together, so Oliver does the thing he used to do so well: he lies.

What follows is a classic runaway-train narrative, full of the exquisite escalations, edge-of-your-seat thrills, and oh-my-god twists. P. J. Vernon's Bath Haus is a scintillating thriller with an emotional punch, perfect for readers curious for their next must-read novel.

I CHECKED THIS BOOK OUT OF MY LOCAL LIBRARY. USE YOUR LIBRARIES, FOLKS! THEY NEED US AND WE NEED THEM MORE THAN EVER.

My Review: I love flawed gay protagonists! They don't come more flawed than Oliver. What he did, how he did it, all truly contemptible. Why? Lower still. By the end of the story, he is the sort of creepy little loser it's easy to hate. Yet I never *quite* learned to hate him. I was certainly contemptuous of his actions...for which he paid a steep price.

Nathan, well...he's a rotten-souled chip off the fetid, foul-smelling old block. He does nothing for anyone but himself. He is a walking, talking scion of White Privilege, and not worth the powder it would take to blow him up. Nathan (and family, and friends) I hated with force and vigor.

Why I kept going despite serious problems with the characters peopling the book is simple: the pace picked up after about the 40% mark. It got so involving I couldn't stop. But I will say this, I wouldn't have been kind about the whole thing if Tillie had not been okay.

Borrow it from the library. Not a book you'll want to re-read.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

THE REDSHIRT
COREY SOBEL
The University Press of Kentucky
$29.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Shortlisted for 2020 Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize

Corey Sobel challenges tenacious stereotypes in this compelling debut novel, shedding new light on the hypermasculine world of American football. The Redshirt introduces Miles Furling, a young man who is convinced he was placed on earth to play football. Deep in the closet, he sees the sport as a means of gaining a permanent foothold in a culture that would otherwise reject him. Still, Miles's body lags behind his ambitions, and recruiters tell him he is not big enough to compete at the top level. His dreams come true when a letter arrives from King College.

The elite southern school boasts one of the best educations in America and one of the worst Division One football programs. King football is filled with obscure, ignored players like Miles—which is why he and the sports world in general are shocked when the country's top recruit, Reshawn McCoy, also chooses to attend the college. As brilliant a student as he is a player, the intensely private Reshawn refuses to explain why he chose King over other programs.

Miles is as baffled as everyone else, and less than thrilled when he winds up rooming with the taciturn Reshawn. Initially at odds with each other, the pair become confidants as the win-at-all-costs program makes brutal demands on their time and bodies. When their true selves and the identities that have been imposed on them by the game collide, both young men are forced to make life-changing choices.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Let's start with the easy bits: Clearly Author Sobel, football alum of DUKE University, knew the sports parts inside out. Clearly he understood the racism and exploitation inherent in King/Duke University inviting Black players to its program, and campus. And I strongly suspect he knew some closeted players. He himself is not gay, and it shows.

This is not a knock. The man understands viscerally the cost of hiding and sneaking. But he doesn't get the longing for a man to touch you and be touched by you because I'll wager he's never felt it. What he does get is the way love, real true first love, makes a man out of a boy. That part is absolutely crystal clear, and is the heart of my appreciation for this story. Reshawn the phenom's hatred for the entire enterprise of college football, possibly the game itself, gets serious exploration. It's counterpointed to Miles's "I-am-a-camera" absorption in the colors and the personalities and the panoply of the game's celebrants, as Author Sobel directly describes them:

Here came the celebrant. Coach Zeller's vestments were a purple polo shirt, pressed white khakis, and unscuffed tennis shoes he reserved for games. He took his place at the head of the half circle, and once the last people squeezed inside and the doors closed he began his first pregame speech as King's head coach.

It's not necessary to reproduce Zeller's blather about either rising or sliding, about choosing and losing. It's not like it makes any difference, but it does show the author's clear grasp of the milieu and his own keen perception of the performative and ritualistic elements of football at this school.

What the author also gets is what it takes to be Other in a world that has no room, no time, no oxygen for Otherness. What happens is cruel and vicious and mean-spirited. Miles is the most intensely tested character in this book and it is unbelievable to me that his power and strength could go unnoticed by the people around him. The adults clearly see it and clearly want it...but on their own terms.

The end of the story is not at all what one would expect it to be. The end of the story is, in so many ways, the end of childhood's sweet spot in adolescence and the entry of Miles...and Reshawn...into the dark, cold, stinking pool of adulthood. Reshawn is, like Miles himself, tested and comes through a man. The others? The team, the coaches, not one of them is anything other than a dupe. They're fools caught on the deck of Plato's ship of fools, all the worse because they see it and choose it.

I can't imagine all that many of my fellow queer gents are football-mad enough to want to wade through the games and practices. There's no compensatory sex to make the enterprise less...cishet...and that is deeply too bad. I think, if y'all can pry open your rage-sealed hatred for the way team sports treated you, you'll find a story about personal power, about truly accepting yourself and your place in this world, and about how important it is to know your friends are fully, completely there for you if you're to make any kind of success out of adult life. And thus how very satisfying Miles's story is. That is what you get; you should come experience it; and take some time to appreciate that this is not some lame fantasy of The Lockerroom, but the voice of experience telling you how it goes when it goes right.

SUBTLE BLOOD, third and (almost) final Will Darling Adventure, and HOW GOES THE WORLD, tidy-up small tale to complete this series

SUBTLE BLOOD
K.J. CHARLES (Will Darling Adventures #3)
KJC Books (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Will Darling is all right. His business is doing well, and so is his illicit relationship with Kim Secretan--disgraced aristocrat, ex-spy, amateur book-dealer. It’s starting to feel like he’s got his life under control.

And then a brutal murder in a gentleman’s club plunges them back into the shadow world of crime, deception, and the power of privilege. Worse, it brings them up against Kim’s noble, hostile family, and his upper-class life where Will can never belong.

With old and new enemies against them, and secrets on every side, Will and Kim have to fight for each other harder than ever—or be torn apart for good.

ANOTHER GIFT FROM MY YOUNG GENTLEMAN CALLER. HE TRULY IS THE BEST.

My Review: This is how you end a series...not with a whimper, but a loud, resounding bang.

The entire world could've finished exploding and I'd've ignored it. I needed to know how this tale ended. I needed the series to live up to the start. (It did.) This is a rare enough occurrence that I wanted to mention it especially, and early in my review. If you're looking for a series to read, read this one; it's got the exciting action and the romantic tension and the period details that make a good read a superior one. Take a look at The Sugared Game's review to see how serious I am...despite the w-bomb Author Charles dropped on me, I still recommend the series. (Might not've had there been another one in this book. But there wasn't.)

In this last planned story of Will Darling and his belovèd Kim Secretan, we're treated to the strange spectacle of Kim without commitments to anything more than Will's bookshop, Will's bed, and Will himself. It's sweet, it's domestic, and it's peculiar! It also is destined to be but an interlude, as we know since the series is called "The Will Darling Adventures" not "The Will Darling Stories." As Kim's life is...unmoored...so Will's is ever more firmly anchored in Kim. Their expanded time together suits Will so completely that he can only be happy, even though...well, there's the little problem of boredom, isn't there, in the dailiness of life.

The list, as he well knew, comprised most of {his bookselling rival}’s hopes, dreams, and sexual fantasies, since he shared the deceased Lord Aveston’s love of Elizabethan and Jacobean music. Will couldn’t tell a madrigal from a macaroon, but he hadn’t got the job for his bibliographic skills. In fact, he’d spent much of his time with the Avestons simply chatting to the new viscount, a pleasantly dim young man who was far more interested in swapping war stories and rattling on about cricket than in anything that might be classed as intellectual pursuits.

Fear not...the long arm of Author Charles isn't about to leave us mired in the muck of Life as most people live it.

Will sighed. “We didn’t all go to Eton.”

“Aristocracy means ‘rule of the best’, and I can’t think of any company in which Chingford would be counted as best, including the average gaol. Yet the hereditary principle demands we grant power, authority, and vast swathes of land to a man who couldn’t run a whelk stall if you gave him a copy of How To Run A Whelk Stall with corners turned down to mark the good bits.”

–and–

Will felt a whole-body wave of refusal. It was bad enough Kim being Lord Arthur Secretan: he couldn’t become a marquess. It would be impossible. He’d vanish into a world of stately homes and impossible wealth, somewhere Will couldn’t hide and would never belong. They’d never belonged together in the first place. Everything between them had been built piece by piece over a chasm, and that bridge had proved fragile enough in the past without having to bear the crushing weight of Kim’s heritage. They wouldn’t survive this. He’d lose him. “Oh shit,” he said.

It's Kim's family, you know it's bad and going to get worse; you also know that Will's anxiety about Kim's privileged upbringing, Kim's membership in the aristocracy, and Will's unworthiness to be with such a Personage is going to hit overdrive...along with Kim's complete and utter indifference to anything except what keeps him apart from Will. Which, if he has any say whatever about it, will be nothing now, nothing to come, nothing ever.

Kim, like most members of his class, has a lot to say about what happens in the world.

And, as noted above, we're whisked from Will's inherited bookshop into Kim's ancestral manse, with Kim driving the vehicle of their love-match at the destination of not inheriting the worldly goods he so deeply detests.

“Because even if they did think we were fucking, they wouldn’t believe I was anything more than your bit of rough, would they?”

“No,” Kim said. “That’s the daily drip of insult you can expect as things are now, which is why I don’t want them to get worse. Because you are everything more, and I resent to the bottom of my soul that you should feel any other way. Wait for me; I’ll call you. Be good.”

–and–

It wasn’t just that the place was so big and so lavish and so horribly empty. It was that as they walked through room after room, decorated with trappings Will didn’t know how to appreciate, the tomblike silence of the place descended on them both. Kim’s descriptions were mannered and forced, and when he didn’t speak, it was not in the usual way they were quiet together, but in a nothing-to-say way that made an empty space between them. And how could Will talk when it felt like he was on a Cook’s Tour of a stately home, and everything he said was an advertisement of how little he belonged?

Of course, this being a situation that Cannot Be Discussed with Kim's laughingly-termed-family, and his odious brother Chingford is going to make things hard for the faggot loser traitor brother he's spent his entire life detesting, despising, and resenting, despite the fact that the aforementioned man is doing his utmost to prevent Chingford from being hanged for murder.

He's not only ungrateful and a jackanapes, he's deeply stupid. Every action he takes in the course of this story is evidence of the fact that Chingford is all that is bad and unworthy about the aristocracy. And there is not a single second at which he changes course. In some people, there is no impulse to decency. Chingford is one of those people.

But Kim, with his Will standing ever vigilant and always prepared for violence, at his shoulder, does not give up. He runs out of ideas for actions to take on Chingford's behalf; he loses his cool, abandons his self-assurance, and still...with a lot of help from Will's observational skills and his own finely honed instinct for making a lot of waffle sound portentous...comes into the very information that will allow him to rescue his clot of an elder brother and never so much as see him, or his objectionable father, again.

This being a K.J. Charles novel, you know that will not be the end of it.

Chingford, like so many thick people, snatches defeat from the jaws of victory.

He led the way along, and round, and down the stairs to a corridor where they came face to face with Lord Chingford. He was wearing plus fours. Will had always thought they were the stupidest way you could wear trousers short of putting them on your head, and Lord Chingford’s appearance wasn’t changing his mind.

“Christ,” the Earl said in lieu of greeting. “Must you be underfoot all the damned time?”

“I’d prefer not to be,” Kim said. “Perhaps we could have the conversation that I came here for, and then I can remove myself from your presence.”

I can sense your despairing moan from here. You're correct: This is Chingford dodging the shield Kim is prepared and able to offer him, so he can make a much, much worse hash of things.

But that is just the icing on the cake. The rich, buttery madeira cake. The full-bodied, overloaded friutcake. The truly astounding stupidities that Chingford commits aren't for this brief review to reveal. For one thing I don't want to be shouted at about spoilers and for another, there is so very much pleasure to be had in the journey this story takes to get our men to their Happily Ever After that I want to leave it to you to explore and experience. It is...absolutely...bloody...perfect.

I can't recall too many times I've said that. I can recall that, each time I have, I've meant it.

A three-plus book story about a pair of gay men in a time and a place that doesn't like that mode of existence, that brings them together over class lines and around high-stakes spy-story threats, and brings the pair of them and their found family safely home believably (within the universe depicted) is a beautiful thing. In this story cycle, a man damaged by what he had to do to survive in the Great War's trenches meets a badly damaged aristocrat, a queer younger son with quirky (by the standards of his class) moral principles, who declines to serve in that war in any way, and from those opposite poles they fall in love. Along the way, spycraft is used to bring very, very nasty people to justice, if not always via the law. In the course of this, our main men hash out issues between themselves, issues that stem from their miserable pasts, and they discover the true joy of the tales being told: Making a Life out of what was only an existence.

Their discussions of the problems they've faced already, of the issues they can foresee, and the deep-seated terrors of Being Together in the Cold, Cruel World that any couple of any configuration must face are very real.

“A future. You know the concept? The shape you want the rest of your life to take? I want mine with you, all of it. A future, a forever. I love you.” He said it quite calmly, as if it was an established fact. “People say I love you to madness, but I love you to sanity, because loving you is the sanest thing I have ever done. You are everything to me, Will, and I cannot lose you to my miserable family and an accident of birth.”

–then–

“Stop being strong at me. You weren’t ready for that conversation, that’s all.”

“No. I wasn’t. Thanks for understanding that. I just...”

“Panicked.”

“I did not panic.”

“I don’t think the less of you for it. But you definitely panicked.”

“Sod off.”

“It’s merely an observation.”

“Sod off.”

“If it’s any consolation, I’m still more of a shambles than you.”

“I’m beginning to wonder,” Will muttered. He brushed his lips over Kim’s fingers, and felt the sense of—not panic, obviously, but extreme nervous tension recede.

Real conversations. Ones I can hear myself having. Ones I have in fact had. And that's the beauty of the whole-series read, as the capstone of a series of stories wherein we've made an emotional investment in the characters: It's not life, it's better than, more organized than, and more fully fleshed than the life mere mortals can expect to lead.

Will, I think, has the best way of putting his—probably all of our—feelings into his relatable perspective.

So he’d do better. He had to: he wasn’t giving this up now. There was something in Kim that called to something in himself with a fierce urgency like the baying of hounds on the scent, and that was all that mattered. Yes, there were going to be problems and he’d have to make sure he didn’t add to them by, for example, punching any more rich people. But he’d never felt the sort of connection with another human soul that he did with Kim, and he wasn’t letting it go either by choice or by stupidity, and that was all there was to it.

That is, in fact, all there ever is to it.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

HOW GOES THE WORLD?
K.J. CHARLES (Will Darling Adventures #3.5)
Author's website
Free PDF download

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: The Positively Final Appearance: a two-part epilogue with Daniel and Archie at a house party and Kim and Will in a gentleman's club, because those are definitely settings that go well for them.

Epilogue to Think of England/Will Darling Adventures.

My Review: As the author says: "This isn’t a standalone story at all. It will make sense only if you’ve read Think of England, Proper English, and the Will Darling Adventures trilogy, and contains spoilers for some of those."

This is absolutely true, and one would do well to heed her words.

Bill and Jimmy, Pat and Fen and Daniel: at dinner, they all looked to Archie almost as they had twenty years ago, with no glare of electricity to expose weary eyes and wrinkles. That in itself made him reflect on quite how much they had, or had not, changed.

–and–

“...I’m sure I told you I met him in my club? Not the Symposium. And...well. I saw him look at Curtis.”

Will, it is safe to say, does not have the gift of spotting people’s inclinations and affections. If there is a direct opposite of that gift, in fact, that’s what he has. At least he takes my word for these things.

“Really? Sir Archie? Bloody hell.”

Will and Kim meeting Daniel and Archie...it is a heart-filling, eye-watering, nose-blowing moment. It means a lot to see the world from one's agèd viewpoint acknowledged and made part of the future. It was inspired of Author Charles to have Archie and Will meet, but to tell it from Kim's point of view. We don't need to hear the two of them connecting, in fact it would feel so invasive as to cause embarrassment. Daniel and Kim, however...well. Sneaky, weaselly bastards the pair of 'em, can't violate their space since they'll violate yours without a qualm.

But only if they must. And that really is one of the main messages of this series. Boundaries, while they are there to be pushed, must also be respected. And that was the burden of the refrain throughout these delightful reads.

I don't know about you but I need to believe this world can exist. It contains an honor and honesty so much more deeply rooted than the stereotypical conceptualization of the concepts we're accustomed to. It doesn't shy away from hard choices or minimize risks behind lazy, or worse, dishonest screens of Propriety.

Neither Archie nor Will would consent to be in harness next to a dishonest man. A liar, well...clearly that's got to be done, doesn't it, to accomplish the goals. As to those goals, it's the clever ones that figure those out. Archies and Wills feel the trust they feel for their men because they see what the sneaks point at and are smart enough to get it, though utterly incapable of articulating it for themselves.

In this short read, we cap five books and a story with the assurance that, come what may, these men whose love and whose lives are valued at little to nothing by the rest of the world are all right, will be all right, and have made their place in that unforgiving and intolerant world big enough to bring more of our kind into, their safety to assure.

World without end.

THE SUGARED GAME, second of three Will Darling gay spy adventures, and TO TRUST MAN ON HIS OATH, its coda

THE SUGARED GAME
K.J. CHARLES (Will Darling Adventures #2)
KJC BOOKS (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$3.99 Kindle edition, available now

Real Rating: 4.5* of five, rounded down because even though we went alllllmost a whole MM romantic mystery without a single w-bomb splattering my Imperial aesthetic hems, there the bastard was, so call it four...well, no, leave it at four-and-a-half stars because it was bloody good fun

The Publisher Says: It's been two months since Will Darling saw Kim Secretan, and he doesn't expect to see him again. What do a rough and ready soldier-turned-bookseller and a disgraced shady aristocrat have to do with each other anyway?

But when Will encounters a face from the past in a disreputable nightclub, Kim turns up, as shifty, unreliable, and irresistible as ever. And before Will knows it, he's been dragged back into Kim's shadowy world of secrets, criminal conspiracies, and underhand dealings.

This time, though, things are underhanded even by Kim standards. This time, the danger is too close to home. And if Will and Kim can't find common ground against unseen enemies, they risk losing everything.

MY YOUNG GENTLEMAN CALLER KNOWS TO BUY ME EVERY RELEASE FROM THIS AUTHOR. HE IS THE BEST.

My Review: I did not see the ending coming. It's very hard to fool someone who's been reading as long as I have about something this central to the story for two whole books. I am clearly a sociopath because, as the finale debuted in the theatre (note misspelling intentional) of my mind I, the audience, was on my (mental) feet shouting for more gore. Gore there is, be forewarned.

But oh how satisfyingly deployed.

In my review of Slippery Creatures, I commented that the story resembled Notorious (Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant {who is the perfect model of Kim Secretan IMO}, Nazi spies) only with 1940s hunk Steve Cochran (my mental casting director's choice for Will Darling) in the Bergman role.

This time, as Richard Hannay is directly referenced in the text of the story, I thought of The Three Hostages because we're doing a similar amount of worry about and protecting people from unseen assailants and malefactors. But honestly, I say seek your parallel in the twists and turns, the puppetmaster-pulling-strings artfulness of North by Northwest. The hostages, their fates, the supporting characters' various interrelationships...similar enough that I kept picturing Will in Eva Marie Saint's wardrobe.

I will say that it was a tad disturbing. Nothing compared to what Will would've thought of it, of course.

This outing is more, shall we say, meaty than the first...we're starting from what every lover dreads, being ghosted by the belovèd:

“Don’t look at me,” Will said. “I’ve no idea what he’s up to. I haven’t heard from him since I don’t know when.”

He knew exactly when: the second of January. It was currently the twenty-second of February. That was a sore point he had no desire at all to discuss, so he added, “I’m not sure if he ever uses the title. It’s not compulsory, is it, if it’s one of those whatsits?”

–and–

Will wasn’t a country girl, courted and cast aside by a London seducer, and it would not do to give the impression that he felt jilted. Kim’s demeanour gave no indication of regret, still less a desire to resume relations, and Will was damned if he’d embarrass himself by behaving differently.

Only you very much are, Will, you're in love so far out of your league it isn't remotely funny. The wonderful part is that, unlike the incredibly unrealistic plot of Maurice, we're not left wondering what on Earth the two of you will talk about the twenty-two hours a day you're not actually fucking. And Kim's world has already cast him out, to the edges and fringes at least if not all the way out, so there's little danger of you having the awful luck of attending too many of the parties that Author Charles skewers so beautifully in this story...and where Will acquits himself creditably, if not brilliantly, all to serve his mate Maisie as she and Phoebe, Kim's fiancée and Will's friend, start Maisie's rise in the World of Fashion:

"...You need to dress for your own body, not pretend you’ve someone else’s, don’t you think?” (Quite revolutionary, Maisie!)

–and–

“I don’t know how to break it to you, dear boy, but if Maisie pursues a career in fashion, she is likely to meet people of the homosexual or sapphic persuasions. Try not to be shocked.”

“So?”

“So Phoebe thought she should learn to react in an environment where a misstep wouldn’t hurt. As it turned out, she is sure-footed, and a quick study. I see why you both like her so much. I’d like to know her better myself.”

From Kim, that is the highest praise imaginable! And it makes me think more of him as Maisie is the simplest kind of person to underestimate: The honest, forthright, always-herself good-mannered cheerful soul. It doesn't do to underestimate them, yet people so often do. And here's very aristocratic Kim, son of a marquess, seeing her and valuing her appropriately. I enjoy that facet of the character quite a lot. It's of a piece with his genuine, growing love for Will. Who, need I mention, is utterly in love with Kim. Being men, things aren't great in the communication department...but the sex is smokin' so the connection is there.

Ahhh...so, about the sex...yep, it's there and belongs there. It is decidedly not straight-people friendly. You know your own tolerance for reading about sex, listen to your instincts. If you're willing to be adventurous, this series will definitely reward you with a cracking good spy story and a couple seeking their happiness in spite of a hostile world...which does not include any of the people that matter the most to them.

In this entry the stakes for Will and Kim are astronomical and the results are long-lastingly resonant. They're required, in the course of resolving the matter of the first book's primary antagonists, to confront demons within and without human forms to which they each...both...have deep ties. It's clear that Kim possesses facts he isn't sharing, and while that can be good spycraft, it's unmitigated hell on relationships:

He didn’t delude himself that asking Kim to tell him the truth meant it would happen, either. They’d been honest with one another as far as it went, and that was something, maybe even a lot, but Will had a feeling all it had achieved was to dig their foxhole deeper.

–and–

“Go on, go,” he said. “Don’t come back. Keep your precious secrets if that’s all you care about, and leave me alone. This isn’t forgivable.”

Kim went. He didn’t even have the decency to give Will a fight or slink out shamefacedly; he just picked up his coat and hat and left. The door closed behind him, setting the bell jangling.

–and–

Will had more self-respect than to trail after him any more.

Horseshit. There is, in every love story, the moment when communication breaks down, both parties are backed up against different walls, and things are at an impasse. In that moment, one feels as though "The End" has appeared on the screen and it's time to gather one's detritus and toss it into the bin on the way out of the theatre. This is almost never true in real life, and pretty much never, ever in fiction. Self-respect and being in love are two ends of one balance beam only in the most simplistic stories, and Author Charles does not traffic in those.

But, as usual, it takes Very Very High Stakes to overcome the grumpy pride of men and compel them to reassert their pair bond. The stakes in this story, which were already quite high, elevate to existential-threat levels. There is so very much riding on Kim getting this issue, the one from last book, resolved...so very much for the men, for their found family, for the U.K. as a whole...that the savvy reader knows the price for Kim will be high. Will, given the choice of what to do and how to do it:

“Do you know Lepanto?”

“The Chesterton poem?”

“There was a bit I was trying to remember...I looked it up afterwards. ‘Dim drums throbbing in the hills half heard, Where only on a nameless throne a crownless prince has stirred, Where risen from a doubtful seat and half-attainted stall, The last knight of Europe takes weapons from the wall.’”

Kim’s lips parted. Will held his eyes, willing him to believe. “That’s you.”

–and–

“I,” Kim began at last, and had to try again. “I would like to be—not alone.”

“Shoulders right here. Suitable for leaning on, crying on, or standing at for the purposes of a fight.”

Have you ever, in all your born days, heard a more moving, more vivid and intensely felt, declaration of love than that? This is the spine-stiffening speech, the statement of commitment, that Will uses to arm Kim for a confrontation his entire lifetime's worth of guilt and insecuritites tells him he can only lose.

It's no spoiler to say that Kim and Will prevail...it's a series! this is two of three!...but there are the necessary costs to the men. They are deep, painful extractions of value, they are seriously out of proportion to the success the men have delivered, and they are going to lead to a fireball of a series-ending book three, Subtle Blood.

...if only she hadn't befouled the experience with that w-bomb at 89%/page 214....

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

TO TRUST MAN ON HIS OATH
K.J. CHARLES (Will Darling Adventures #2.5)
Author's website
Free PDF download

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A Will Darling Adventures interlude.

Set a week after the ending of The Sugared Game (so contains mild spoilers for that book).

My Review: It's important to understanding the gestalt of Will and Kim to read this short piece. It feels to me like it was clipped off the end of the book, and made into its own thing, instead of being the epilogue it feels to me like it should've been.

I was very moved by the sweetness of Will's acceptance of Kim's faults, amply displayed in previous instalments of the series; and his acceptance of Kim's worthiness of trust. It takes a lot to expose your vulnerability to someone whose track record of treating you is spotty on the plus side. Importantly, though, Will acknowledges that Kim has always come through when the stakes are high and the situation is grave.

I'm also very moved by the way the author frames the conversation, as it accords well with what I know of biphasic sleep: a period of wakefulness in the middle of one's night that disinhibits the usual censorship functions, that allows one's conversation to open doors and breach walls that seem impossible during ordinary daytime. Then, when the needful things are said, sleep returns and the day that dawns, dawns brighter than it would have otherwise.

I was charmed; I was also better prepared for Subtle Blood, so I recommend the read to you, too.

FOUR GAY BDSM THRILLERS, the "Power Exchange" series by A.J. Rose

POWER EXCHANGE
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #1)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: From the moment Detective Gavin DeGrassi steps into the world of BDSM to solve the brutal slaying of Dom George Kaiser, his course is not his own. Mesmerized by the context in which the victim lived and the images seared into his soul, Gavin has to find a way to navigate these unknown waters. With his personal life in upheaval due to a marital split, and his professional life uncertain with the assignment of a new partner, Gavin needs all the help he can get understanding the case.

Enter Ben Haverson, a psychologist and a well known Dom. With Ben’s help as a consultant on the case and attention to Gavin himself, Gavin delves deeper than he ever thought he would into the world of restraints and paddles. Forced to take a closer look at himself, his true nature, and his innermost desires, Gavin has a choice: keep the fear of submitting at bay, or dive in and solve the case with the knowledge he gains? When another victim is discovered, Gavin’s choice is made for him, and he’s pulled headlong into the deepest, most emotional journey of his life.

Unfortunately for him and Ben, a killer has noticed, has taken stock, and has set his sights on the D/s pair. Can Gavin outwit him, or will his first exchange of power be his last?

My Review: Everything that celebration of abuse and belittlement Fifty Shades of Grey wasn't in terms of the BDSM lifestyle. Realistic depiction of how contracts between Dom and sub work, and how very deep a D/s bond becomes in a very short time. It's amazing what committing to eliminating bullshit and nonsense does for a relationship. The sex is really better than the mystery. Not that I'm complaining. That was one fine cherry-popping, A. J. Rose, mighty mighty fine.

The mystery part wasn't deft. Gavin DeGrassi isn't detecting particularly well, given some very very basic events he seems simply not to have noticed. In fact, I spent more than a few minutes screaming at the frequently dumb as a box of rocks Gary Stu "detective" to act like he earned his badge and didn't simply find it in a box of Cracker Jacks....

I could have lived happily without chapter 13 being *quite* so intense. Going over the top here was skating on a razor's edge of being torture porn. Be aware: This is rape, this is abuse.

I picked up the next three in the series after Gavin's Dom said this:

“Gavin, we're going to grow old together, and whether you pick up a gardening hobby, or learn to make you won sushi, or even decide to learn an instrument, I will be right there with you, growing with you. We'll share our whole lives, our quirks and bad habits. It's not just learning your past and who you are today; its getting to see who you'll become tomorrow. I want to be there for that.”

Really, what more can one ask of a gay-themed series than to have the best of us mirrored in the world that even members of our own community regard with alarm.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

SAFEWORD
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #2)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Everywhere Detective Gavin DeGrassi looks he’s reminded of his attack by the Breath Play Killer. It’s in the house he lives in with his partner and Dom, Ben Haverson. It’s in the sympathetic yet pitying looks he receives from his fellow detectives when he returns to the force after a year-long hiatus. It’s in the suffocating coddling of his entire family, and the relentless reporter demanding an exclusive of his ordeal.

Most of all, it’s in his lack of submission to Ben, who isn’t convinced Gavin’s recovered enough to trust the power exchange between them.
The miraculous recovery of two teen boys from a twisted kidnapper gives him heart, and Gavin's determined to prove he can handle anything despite increasing strain between him and Ben, painful nightmares, and panic when anyone touches him.

But his next case is too close for comfort: a friend and colleague found raped and murdered in a fate chillingly similar to what could have been his own, and this killer isn’t stopping with one cop. As the body count rises and taunting souvenirs are being hand-delivered to Gavin, he faces a frustrating lack of leads, a crushing need to prove himself, and a sinking suspicion the imprisoned kidnapper’s reach is further than originally thought. A miasma of uncertainty and fear threaten to suffocate him when he asks a question with which he’s overwhelmingly familiar: what happens when a victim is pushed too far?

My Review: Wow, what a ride. What an amazing adrenaline rush of an ending. What can Rose do to top this one? I'll tell you below.

So, after I found out about Consent, let me revisit this book and explain why it is my personal favorite of the books in the series to date.

The end of Power Exchange was, to put it mildly, a horrific test of the men's strength and commitment. The awfulness of the events that Ben and Gavin endured can't be overstated. The impact of the extreme publicity surrounding the events can't be overstated. These two men were traumatized physically, psychologically, and publicly. In Consent, their violated beings are shown in the process of healing. Their family relationships are shown in all their realistic upheaval and flux. The source of their identity as a couple, Gavin's submission to Ben's Domination of his body and his spirit, is fractured and despite their mutual and deep desire to recover that connection, they aren't able to...but they are not either one vaguely in the mood to give up trying.

Ben loves Gavin, Gavin loves Ben. This is the given point from which this story operates. Nothing that has happened has changed them so much that the facts aren't true. But then there is the other stuff lying between them in huge mounds of rubble and vast slicks of toxic waste. The trust issues that follow in the wake of being raped. The fears of inadequacy in the face of your beloved partner's pain, which you can't fix. The awful moment when your own broken inner self seems to be too much for your partner to handle, so you feel you *should* release them from your further fulfilling your needs.

"You still need someone to take control sometimes, but now giving that control unbalances you. Believe me, I understand. I may not feel exactly the same, but I do understand."

"Do you?" I pulled back to look at him. "Does it bother you that I can't seem to trust anyone, even you?"

–and–

"You are the only one I want, sub or not, fucked in the head or whole. This last year, with you, I've woken up inside. I used to think it was the thrill of the whip, of seeing someone on his knees for me, or the heat of a freshly reddened ass that made me feel alive. Getting someone to fly with me, taking submission for the gift it is--that's a heady thing. It makes my nerves sing and my heart beat fast. Gets me hard and I feel like I can do anything. And that feeling is a pittance compared to being with you."

And then the sense of the thing reasserts itself: NO. NOT A DAMN CHANCE. Ben and Gavin each reach this awful precipice and look into the abyss of aloneness after each man finally discovers himself, his best self, in the other man's eyes. They say no, they grab hold of each other and they move together as far away as they can from that horrible annihilating aloneness.

And they do so while solving a horrible crime and rescuing innocent young men from vile servitude. They don't come out of this case unscathed but they come out changed for the better, is also a great deal sadder.

Far and away the best of the series to date.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

CONSENT
A.J. ROSE
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Cole, what’s wrong?

Former detective Gavin DeGrassi likes his new life and his job as a university professor, molding the minds of the next generation of law enforcement. It keeps him in the field he loves, but out of the media and out of the danger he seems to draw. He’s settled and happy with his partner and Dom, Ben Haverson.

It’s Myah.

Until a middle of the night phone call from his brother, Cole, whose desperation and fear yank him back into the world of criminals and countdowns. Only this time, the stakes are much higher.

She’s missing.

Detective Myah Hayes, Gavin’s sister-in-law and former partner, has a past of her own, one that has returned to claim her. With only their instincts and the help of a rogue CSI, Gavin, Ben, and Cole will do whatever it takes to find Myah, following a flimsy trail of evidence to Chicago, where all is not what it seems—dirty cops, moral pimps, and a nest of snakes who call themselves businessmen.

They’re on a collision course with the worst of humanity, and more than Myah’s life is caught in the vortex. Can they find her, and if they do, will there be anything left to save?

Warning: contains scenes of rape and graphic violence and may not be suitable for sensitive readers. Discretion advised.

My Review: I will keep this short and simple: Author Rose, you have disappointed me. Chapter 25 was unnecessary and prurient, but my disappointment stems from the cheap and shoddy trick it represents on your delighted and dedicated readers. I am most definitely one of them.

I intend this as a compliment: There is no way I would ever have known from the way you wrote Gavin and Ben's relationship what gender you are IRL. On balance I would've expected you to be male, given the startling depth of your characters's physiological responses and the psychology before and behind them. But truly the way you've written the men's characters is simply good writing, something either gender can create if a given level of talent is present.

That makes the sting of being let down so forcefully by the torture porn in chapter 25 so much worse. It made the unpleasant shock of that unnecessary death much less effective as a surprise, a gut-punch, as it was meant to be. And Myah's later torture after the failed escape attempt was also rendered less effective as the horrifying gut-punch it truly was.

Had I edited this book, I would've made the following observation: This number of words would be better spent throughout the book humanizing Ben, Cole, and the elder DeGrassis via phone calls or something.

I will, of course, rush right out to read the fourth entry in this series because the deep and velvety pleasure of seeing myself (idealized, of course) in Ben is too satisfying to deny myself.

"But I’m not through with you, Gavin DeGrassi. I have plans to redden that ass and mark your skin. There are many more orgasms to deny you, and butt plugs to make you wear in public. D-rings I want to add to your corsets, since it’s clear you need restraining again. I haven’t bought our cabin in Colorado for our retirement. We haven’t been to the beach together. I want to go abroad with you. I haven’t picked out the porch swing we’re going to sit on when we’re eighty and yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off our lawn. I want a collar around your throat, and a ring on your left hand. I have plans for us, and I’m going to do everything in my power to see those plans through.”

He's the Dom that many subs crave, and seldom find: The one who loves you and needs to show you that you're his and no one else's. Ben needs Gavin as much as Gavin needs Ben: “I've seen the way you are together. He's your protector, and you're his purpose. He's your glue and you're his art.” That's the best of the D/s world. I need to go back there, and these books do that for me. But I will pick the book up with a heretofore absent wariness.

That hurts like fuck to say.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

RESTRAINT
A.J. ROSE (Power Exchange #4)
The Grim Writer Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$5.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Who brings a Glock on a honeymoon?

Not retired detective Gavin DeGrassi. When his husband Ben asks who he plans to shoot, Gavin has no answer. They’re spending three weeks in Ben’s family cabin near Seattle, not chasing down bad guys. Or are they?

Ben finds evidence the car accident that claimed his parents’ lives more than fifteen years ago was not so accidental. To avenge the Haversons, Gavin dusts off his detective skills and unknowingly paints a target on their backs. Suddenly, Ben is the prime suspect in a crime and the message couldn’t be clearer: drop the investigation or suffer untold consequences.

Gavin will stop at nothing to ensure Ben’s safety and bring the Haversons’ killers to justice, but without help, they’re sitting ducks. Gavin must make unlikely allies in his quest to clear Ben’s name and stop a ruthless crime syndicate. But with his loyalties divided, how far is too far in his quest for justice?

My Review: One entire star off for twelve (12) instances of the w-verb. Seriously. Using any out-of-the-ordinary word twelve times in your book should be a red flag for an author. What am I shorthanding here? Why does this particular word need to be in my book this many times? Y'all'd agree with me if it was "coddiwomple" or "absquatulate" you know you would. "Wink" *shudder* is just as uncommon a word in every other branch of fiction writing beyond MM romance.

Anyway.

The story here is what happens when Ben, our Dom, goes back to his childhood summer home with Gavin, his sub, to celebrate their honeymoon. It's a delightful idea, the men going to gorgeous Seattle for some smexytimes; but this isn't to be. The smexytimes are really not the point. And that's a wonderful thing.

Seriously! It is!

The relationship between partners in a D/s situation matures with the parties involved as it does in all long-term relationships. With that maturity comes the change of sex life. Not lessening. Not death. Just change. In Ben and Gavin's relationship, their routinizing of D/s doesn't require them to compulsively repeat the same acts. They move deeper into each others' cores and negotiate the introduction of far more intimate and demanding behaviors. It is very much one of my pleasures in reading this series to enjoy this evolution of the characters' interactions.

Feelings of disquiet, anger, or aggressiveness, he considered big weaknesses in a Dom and particularly in himself. Funny opinion for a psychologist to have, but we’d been through this in therapy.
–and–
I leaned into his warmth, my heart fluttering against my ribcage like a murder of crows taking flight.

Being a series novel, there are cameos by characters we've met before; the fact that the entire DeGrassi clan is having Thanksgiving back in St. Louis without the men is played off well. And Gavin's call to a St. Louis source for some crucial help is answered, despite the risk to his helper.

“Why are you letting Gavin fight your battles for you? Can’t bring yourself to do it alone? It’s clear he has a brain, but he’s so blinded by devotion to you that he, a retired detective, is turning criminal to do your bidding, to set your mind at ease about Mommy and Daddy’s deaths. They’re dead. This revenge, or whatever you’re trying to accomplish, won’t bring them back. But you have a living, breathing, committed man by your side, and you’re apparently fine if he goes to prison for you. That’s fucked up.”

I like the honesty I see about D/s relationships in the series. It's hard for Ben to give up control; it's hard for him to feel helpless or actually useless in any situation where his earthly treasure, Gavin, is threatened. Every good Dom knows that horrible reality and, if we're at all honest, the creeping fear that our treasured sub will realize "hey! I don't need him after all!" and walk away. Ah, the joys of anxiety! All humans suffer from it. And so very few of us do the simple, smart thing and open up to our most trusted, most beloved partners. How very much pain would be mitigated or even disappeared by this simple, monumental, impossible act!

But such are the musings of one with no dog in this fight anymore. In common with all readers, I use books to teach me the truths I refused to accept from reality. Reading all four books in this series makes me long for a second chance to be young...as do all the other books I read. A joyous ache, a happy poignance, a learnèd innocence. How I pity those who aren't fellow addicts.

THE PALLBEARER, Appalachian grit-lit QUILTBAG criminality

THE PALLBEARER
JORDAN FARMER
Skyhorse Publishing
$24.99 hardcover, $16.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 3.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Lynch, West Virginia, is a husk of a town: houses collapsing, deserted coal mines, the money gone. The residents who have not abandoned their homes find themselves living in poverty with little-to-no job opportunities, fighting for scraps and survival under the rule of Ferris Gilbert—the patriarch of a local family who governs the town with manipulative cruelty.

When Jason Felts, a dwarf and aspiring social worker who lives above the town funeral home, is assigned to counsel one of the Gilbert brothers incarcerated inside a youth correctional facility for possession charges, Ferris Gilbert sees a rare opportunity. He seeks out Jason and insists under threat of violence that he smuggle an ominous package into the jail. Torn between his desire to save the young Gilbert brother from a life of crime and concern for his own safety, Jason must make a life-altering decision. At the same time, Gilbert has his hooks in Terry Blankenship, a strung-out young man desperate to carve out a secret life for himself and his boyfriend. If Terry cannot pay his debts to the Gilberts, he has one choice: kill the local sheriff or face the consequences. Sheriff Thompson is found dead soon after. Now both implicated in serious crimes, Jason and Terry must outrun the law and escape the threat of Ferris Gilbert but there may be nowhere to run . . .

The Pallbearer is an unflinching debut for fans of Frank Bill and Sarah Waters that lays bare the lives of the outsiders of society’s outskirts.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM SKYHORSE PUBLISHING VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Terry Blankenship is a stand-in for all the boys who grow up queer in homophobic places. He has a dead mother, a drunken abusive father, and a drug habit he steals to support. He's a complete dead-ender, and he knows it; he's not even trying to run anywhere except up into the hills where an abandoned hunting cabin hides him and his eighteen-year-old boyfriend, stoner Davey. Old Man Felts, once the town undertaker, gives Terry, in cash, about half what he's really earned at the end of every day that they try to fix up a badly decayed old house in Lynch, where there's no opportunity and no hope:

Even at sixteen, Terry was no stranger to labor and didn't mind the work, but this place felt like a lost cause to him.
–and–
Staying closeted created a certain pain, but it was still an option in a place where being yourself meant risking your life.

So there he is; the way out closed to the likes of Terry a long time ago. He still has Davey, who was the proximate cause of Terry's dad throwing him out of the house after walking in on them, and Davey wants bright lights, big city, maybe Charleston, or Lexington? They need money, so they decide to enter Terry's dog in a dogfight.

This does not, I realize you'll be stunned to learn, go well.

What happens is, the two fools end up owing the local big baddie fifteen hundred dollars. This might as well be a million to these folks. There's no way they can pay it back, so the big baddie (after some murderous threats) tells dear, dim Terry he can work it off: Kill the local sheriff. Here's the gun. Go!

And we're off! Terry escapes the consequences of his crime by going to juvenile prison; there he meets Jason Felts, the sadly crippled (one assumes by in utero exposure to teratogenic substances in the embalming room) nephew of the ex-undertaker and a psychologist at the facility; the big baddie's baby brother; and his doom. Not that Jason doesn't do his goddamnedest to keep Terry from losing his short struggle for life. He does, because his own dreadful disability makes life in this horribly dying corpse-factory of a town such a struggle that he empathizes with its no-hopers.

What Terry cares about, in his time inside juvenile prison, is the dog he used and abandoned. He begs the facility doctor (cold and calloused by the endless parade of the state's wasted youth):

"I need somebody to go by the house and see about my dog," Terry said.

"Not my concern," the doctor said and adjusted his stethoscope.

Then he begs Jason, all he wants is for Jason to deliver a letter to Davey, alone in their shared squat at the abandoned cabin, not knowing where Terry was, probably worried sick:

{Jason} kept thinking about {Terry's} small handwriting, the elegant loop in the cursive P of please. It was capitalized, a single word followed by the dark blot of a period. Words were such fragile, imprecise things, but that please explained everything.

It's completely heartbreaking to me to read books like this, full of the desperation of tiny lives lived in the sweaty asscrack of capitalism, places abandoned because the profit's gone and why should the shareholders pay for crappy, useless people to exist? There's money at stake, fuck their health, their lives, their futures!

This is the burden of the refrain that ran through my head, a grinding sound as the people of Lynch watch the armored cars take the money as the scum run. It's the same the world over, of course; Jordan Farmer has stories to his credit in The Southwest Review, for one example, that explore these same conditions. Like Donald Ray Pollock, he's writing what he knows, or I miss my guess. He's an able talespinner, and he's an above-average writer. His subject is territory he can honestly say is in need of bards. That not one person gets out of this jail free is not his fault, it's simply the truth of the people in the place he writes about.

As the body count mounts, as the damage to the world the small people in here care about grows catastrophic, Jason Felts stands for the Right and the Good. He's lacking in inches, he's been badly served in body by Life, but he does the jobs that no one else wants to do. He ends one long nightmare. It doesn't cost him his life, just his spirit: Rooted forever in Lynch, he's doomed to find his one happy moment far, far away.

It is exactly the right ending.