Risky Maneuvers by Barbara Sheridan & Aleksandr Voinov
Risky Maneuvers revealed some surprising sides that made me enjoy the story more than what I was expecting. First of all it was lighter and sexier than expected: Mikhail “Misha”, the Russian mercenary with connections with the CIA, displays to the world a bad-ass attitude that in the end he is able to let it go when he is in an intimate environment and in the company of a lover; very much indeed like his tattoo, artsy and hidden, not at all the macho man war tattoo someone could imagine. And very much like his attitude and his tattoo, only a lover is allowed to see the real Misha.
On the other side we have Devon “D.”, the US army officer who is disillusioned by his mission and his country. He would like to be left alone, living as a trucker with the only company of a cat; but even in this choice he is not ordinary: his truck is more like a comfy sitting room than a cramped space and his cat is a sophisticated Persian lady kitten, more spoiled than a tsarina.
Misha and D. have a history together, but at the time it was not their moment; D. in Baghdad, Misha in Afghanistan, they were still following a mission, and maybe for D., an ideal. Now D.’s brother, Sam, a liaison officer among various supersecret department of the US government, tracks down Misha to put him together with D. for a very special mission. This is the second surprise of the story: instead of a crash-bum-bam type of adventure, where our heroes can show off their muscles while proving they are still “men” even if they are in love/lust with another man, we find them involved in a mission that seems to come out from a ’50 B-movie. And as in those movies with little budget, the adventure itself is almost home-made, the danger immediate and immediately overcame, and most of the story is centered around the two men and their realization that now is finally the time to make a choice: living together forever and ever, or let it go definitely.
The story is not very long, more around the novella length, and more than half the length is spent in “preparation” of the main event, the mission, so much that, in the end, I appreciated more this part of the story, the meeting of Misha and D., their rediscovery of their relationship, the building of new balances between them, than the second part of the story; actually when I reached that part of the novel, I was thinking “what a pity”, I would have liked more of the light bickering between the two men, and of course more of the hot sex between them.
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Amazon Kindle: Risky Maneuvers
Publisher: Loose Id LLC (July 6, 2010)
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Cover Art by Anne Cain