Review: OK m/m suspense romance
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 08 23, 2012
3.5 stars. A very readable m/m suspense-mystery-romance about two security agents whose team is being targeted by an unknown attacker, and they try to sort out who is the culprit while at the same time sorting out their mixed-up emotions about each other.Tanner, our first-person POV, is under work suspension after mistakes from an earlier mission, and has chosen to spend his time hidden away from the team, wallowing in a dilapidated trailer in a trailer park. His self-imposed solitude is broken when his team comes and asks him to provide a temporary safe house to team member Niall, whose apartment was just blown up. Both Tanner and Niall are less enthused about this since their past relationship had broken apart prior to the suspension. But as the attacks escalate, and even make it into the trailer park, both men have to decide what is more important--their past bitterness, or surviving through the week, and possibly having a future together.The parts I liked--I dug the set-up a lot, and containing most of the action in and around the trailer park was a neat trick that added to the suspense. (I also dug the trailer park denizens who added a lot of color to the story.) The mystery was also pretty good since the author threw in multiple paths to confuse the team about who the real villain was.My issues with the book relate mostly to the pacing. Even though the set-up happens in the first scene with Niall moving in to the trailer, there are a lot of flashbacks in the first half of the book to fill in the reader about their relationship. These glimpses are important to understand why they are so bitter, but it really dragged the story down, and things didn't kick in for me until about 50% in. I like a good long read, but I wished the story had been more tightly told. What also dragged the story down was the repetitive back-and-forth between Tanner and Niall as they argued about the different things that had broken them up. For professionally-trained people who are literally "under the gun" of a stream of attacks, they kvetch a lot. It slowed things down a bit, and personally, made it harder for me to root for them to work things out.Also, one minor point is that Tanner uses a lot of exclamation points in his narration. At times, it made him feel like a much younger, more excited narrator, and it made it harder to take him seriously. I wish some of those had been weeded out.So, this wasn't one of my favorite works by London. As much as I liked the premise, I wish it had some more of the tense immediacy that she had in The Tourist or the tight narrative voice like in Freeman.