Review: An auspicious start of a new series from Z.A. Maxfield...
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 10 21, 2013
The world of m/m romance is all about rules. It gets interesting when authors bend the rules and give us more than standard plots and characters. We read these books for a reason, and as time goes on, the reasons get more diverse and personal.Z.A. Maxfield's first in a new series, "Grime and Punishment," follows the rules. But she goes further than the standard. Jack Masterson is a fallen hero of sorts, a firefighter who barely survived a disastrous collapse, leaving him physically damaged. Unable to work, he rebuilds his life by starting the Brothers Grime, a crime-scene clean-up business. Jack figures that it's sort of like being a firefighter - you save people from despair at a terrible time in their lives.  So Jack seems to have come back from his dark place unscathed, in spite of the cane and the pain that are his everyday companions.But Jack's real damage is older than the disaster that ended his career, and we discover that when his sometime sleepover guest and longtime friend Dave calls to forewarn him that his high school love, Nick, just ate his own gun in his cousin's bathroom.Jack's no innocent. But he has decided that relationships are not who he is, without ever examining the reasons behind it. His friend-with-benefits thing with the closeted Dave seems just fine - until he sees Nick's cousin Ryan, who has an uncanny resemblance to the recent suicide. Nick's death and Ryan's similarity to him open up a world of emotional pain that Jack had thought long buried.Jack and Ryan are left to clean up the mess that Nick left behind, literally and figuratively. Maxfield paints their interaction with vivid economy and credible emotional weight. Making romance characters seem real is not as easy as it sounds, but Maxfield pulls it off with flying colors.