Review: Good read, could have been better
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 27, 2011
This was a tricky one for me to rate.  It's well-written, but it felt a bit disjointed in spots and I thought the ending fell flat.  Still, I have to say I enjoyed it, so I've given it a 4 stars.  It had all the elements I love in M/M slash romance - angst, great sex, and plot.MILD SPOILERS FOLLOWChristian is a beautiful young man with loving, same-sex parents and an adoring older boyfriend, Lucca.  Lucca has proposed to Christian and intends to marry him, but their world comes crashing down when Christian is abducted by a former high school friend and is thrown into service as a slave in a sex-slave ring.  Lucca, with some help from friends, manages to track down and rescue Christian, but not after a great deal of harm has been done to the boy's psyche.  Now, Christian is self-destructive and pushes Lucca away, and Christian's parents give Lucca a chance to salvage what he can of the boy or commit him to a psychiatric facility.  Lucca, of course, steps up to the plate.Here's where the book got a bit weird for me, though.  I don't mind BDSM and the whole sub/dom thing, but Lucca seemed to believe that being Christian's Dom was the only way to pull Christian back from the brink.  Interesting concept.  Lucca's dom is kind - nothing like the abuse Christian suffered during his captivity.  Turns out Christian had written something in a diary that Lucca read about his twisted relationship with his high school friend and his need for submission.  And turns out Lucca just happens to have been in a 2-year dom/sub relationship as the sub for an older man.  Now Lucca must become a "dom" for his Christian.The idea of helping an abused person by dominating them is something I've seen pretty often in M/M slash.  I recently  reviewedThirty Daysat 2 stars - a story similar to this one, but where the damaged boy had been abused since he was a child.  The sub character in that story was so incredibly damaged, I could not see that he could ever really choose the BDSM lifestyle.  This book was different.  In "Lethal Obsession," Christian is an adult when he is abused, and then only for 3 weeks or so.  Not to diminish what he went through (nobody should ever have to suffer that horror), but it was more believable to me that Christian could choose to be sub to Lucca's dom.Still, there was just something about the ending with the sub/dom thing that left me feeling sad.  I think perhaps, if the author had at least given us tiny little hints at the beginning about Christian's interest in pain/dominance, it would have helped.  I know Ms. Montgomery probably wanted her readers to be just as shocked as Lucca was to realize what Christian's hidden desires were, but I kept wondering if this was what Christian really had wanted.  It might have helped me if as a reader I could have actually read what was in Christian's diary, rather than just having Lucca just mention it.  Hence only 4 stars.  Good read, but could have been better.Sarah AlexanderAuthor of "From the Depths"