Best Writing Style (3° place): Angels of the Deep by Kirby Crow
The best word to describe Angels of the Deep is "dark"; it started in the dark, both literally than figuratively, to continue always in the dark. Even when it's daylight, the darkness is there, and sincerely I always had the feel, reading this book, that there was like a cloud covering the sun, and even if the events take place during the day, no real sunlight was allowed in the story. The only light I perceived was the artificial one of neon, a light that was cold, in this way reinforcing the darkness and also the coldness. No sunlight means no natural warm. All in this book was dark and icy.
I realized that I concentrated more on the feeling it left me than on the story, but it's also hard to give you a short summary of the story without giving up the end, but I will try. At the beginning of the book Beck is an orphan, a ward in the hand of a priest; unfortunately Beck is suffering an unspeakable hell living with the priest, a pedophiles who calls Beck his Angel. As expected in this situation, Beck is escaping reality building a world of his own, till the day an ancient woman appears and "frees" Beck from his hell. Jump ahead in time, Beck is now an adult, married man and soon-to-be divorced. It seems that he loves his wife, Cat, but not in the way he should love her; Cat is a good woman, but when Beck is near her, I feel more friendship than love passing between them. On the other hand, Beck is feeling something strong for someone he should not, Sean, his partner in the police facility they both work for.
Also Sean is aware of the feelings between them, and he would be willing to try, but Beck is unwilling. He finds all the right excuse, he is married, he can't do that to Cat, Sean is a co-worker... strange enough one of the excuse is not that he is not gay, as if the gender of them is not important... Anyway I had the feeling that the real reason was that Beck is still traumatized by what happened to him when he was a child. Beck is the exactly profile of an abused child, unable to tighten real bond with a lover, reluctant to speak of his problem, ready to lie to therapists when they near the real problem. The only thing that I will not add to the other typical thing is Beck being gay, since, first of all it seems not to be one of his "trouble", and second, as I said before, his relationship with Sean is strange, and being both men seem not to be the real problem between them.
All right, telling you these things, I covered more or less 50 pages of the more than 300 pages of the book, and I can't say more, since from this moment on the reader is plunged inside the story right in the middle of the event and will resurface only in the end. The author don't prolong the broth with water to make it last, but serve the main course and let the reader to deal with it in full play mode. The story takes is direction and goes straight to the end without hesitation and not leaving to the reader neither the time to breath. I was turning the page hoping to find a moment to stop, and instead there wasn't neither one. The book is 300 pages long, but no one of these pages is an embellishment, they are all center stage events.
Kirby Crow is not famous for being sexy, she is more famous to be a teaser (she will never be free of that title after letting me suffer for one very long book, Scarlet and the White Wold 1, for a kiss, and for another even more long book, the second in the series, for a sex scene...), and Angels of the Deep confirms it; even if, truth be told, there is sex in the book (and not only in the last chapter) and there is also a continuous running of eroticism in all the pages, all the characters, not only Beck and Sean, are all very physical, and their body reactions are pretty clear and described. So the only moment that the icy cloak I felt on the story is raised, is when that sexy running surfaces here and there.
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Cover Art by Analise Dubner