Best Gay Mystery / Thriller (2° place): L.A. Boneyard by P.A. Brown
Sometime author and readers wonder what could happen “after” an happily ever after, when the passion maybe becomes routine, or when maybe you realize that what probably you thought was something without future, could well be your forever and ever, and well, it scares you.
David and Chris are 4 years old partners and really, everything seems perfect: they love each other, they desire each other, they even commit privately and David is wearing Chris’s ring, even if it’s not legal, it’s binding for them. So, no trouble in Paradise? Apparently, but then Jairo enters David’s life.
Jairo is a young detective and David will have to train him. Jairo is not only beautiful, but also someone who shares way more with David than Chris. I don’t know but I feel like David shelters Chris from his ugly life, and in doing so he is cutting him out. Instead with Jairo he can talk of everything, he can share everything. And when Jairo makes a move on him, at first David is tempted, who will not be? David is stronger than temptation, but he feels guilty all the same, even for a “mental” cheat.
On the other side there is Chris and his clear love for David, a love that pushes him maybe to have an irrational behaviour, like a magnet he attracts and drives back David according to his mood. He has all the right to be angry, and has all the right to question David, but after that, I don’t know, probably he should have been more willing to understand David’s reason, and not maybe the words of a jealous man.
Last Jairo, the third man, the villain in the old romances formula. At first I didn’t like him, but then I started to think, maybe he is really interested in David, it’s not only a question of sex. True Jairo is married and with sons, he is not exactly behaving like a good man, but maybe he had no choice, maybe he is only a former young boy who did what his family, all people around him, expected from him. For sure he can’t be the hero of this novel, and I didn’t expect for Chris to like him, but maybe I understood and comprehended why David likes him.
I like the intake of the author in this story, I like her courage to put in question her pair of heroes, to give us a glimpse of what reality and routing can do to a perfect romance, it made the romance more real. Even in the previous book David and Chris were not an ordinary couple, and their was not a whirlwind romance, au contraire, I think David put on stake a lot for being with Chris, and so it would have been not realistic if everything went smooth like oil between them.
A last note on the cops themed set: it’s not a big boom bam type of story, the crimes David is involved with are dirty and awful, but the author didn’t linger on the awfulness, she just gave you enough details to understand that these are not some unlikely fictional crimes, these are the day-to-day horror of metropolis chronicles.
http://www.mlrbooks.com/ShowBook.php?book=PBLA0002
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Amazon: LA Boneyard
L.A. Series:
1) L.A. Heat: http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/604942.html
2) L.A. Mischief
3) L.A. Boneyard
Reading List:
http://www.librarything.com/catalog_bottom.php?tag=reading list&view=elisa.rolle