Review: Another fantastic JL read
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 2, 2014
This was the second time I've read this book. Shamefully, I remembered nothing but the beatnik dad - he refers to way too many men as "cat" not to remember him - and that it had a generally happy ending. Clearly I read way too many books last year if I forgot a Josh Lanyon novel. I read 537 books in 2013 and I'm pretty sure that's a low estimation. I know, it's a sickness.Here’s another sickness: Why do I feel a sense of pride that Elliot was shot, in the rain, at Pioneer Courthouse Square, in Portland, Oregon? I should be a tour guide – that’s right, folks, Portland is so great FBI agents get shot here too! And in such a pretty area! Isn’t that wonderful! Followed by: Hometown pride, GO….oh that’s right, we don’t have a sports team. But we do have some very tall trees.This section of the review is entitled: Elliot Mills, you giant sack of poo.Elliot, buddy, I mean it sincerely when I say I love you but if you say there’s nothing but sex (and Nissans) between you & Tucker one more time, I’m planning on borrowing the nearest penis & making violent love to him myself. You ask yourself, "how the hell could you be homesick for a place that had never been home?" Um, cause you love him? Cause he is your home? Maybe? DUR. You seem to come to your senses by the end of the novel, but I’ve got my eye on you, buddy. (Seriously, though, I lurve you.) And ease up on all the Civil War music; that cannot possibly be healthy for anyone.This section is entitled: Tucker Lance, I want to climb your horny gingerness like a howler monkey.You make my down-belows sparkle. That’s pretty much it.To both boys: Communication is not just for cry baby pee-pants anymore, ok?That’s right, adults do it too. Listen to teacher now….Elliot, you should learn by watching Tucker. He may be a tough FBI agent who sucks all the air of any room he enters (with his utter ginger hotness), but he’s clearly willing to open up and share his feelings with you. Even if it takes another near death incident and about 75% of the book for him to do it. However, this is something you both need to work on. Like Dr. Phil says, do you want to be right or do you want to be happy? Something to think about, hmm? Dismissed.That said, Josh Lanyon is fantastic at portraying a serious lack of communication. It’s something I find intensely annoying when done by some (many) authors, because it generally goes something like: "Hey, dude, I really need to expl—oh, look. The vampires are attacking again." They’re just simple minded distractions created by an author to keep heroes apart. They have no actual meaning beyond extending an already weak novel. Lanyon creates two strong-willed men who are afraid to openly communicate, afraid of the answers they might hear. Like Adrien says in "Death of a Pirate King." "I just didn’t ask the questions I didn’t want to know the answers to."Another thing Lanyon does well? Sexy sex sex. Thank you, Mr. Lanyon, for not adding the ever popular “I need to stroke my ding dong in the shower cause I’m thinking about my one true love & the author thinks it’s way too early for us to get it on.” Instead we get ha-ta-ta-tot-hot dreams & memories of sex with Tucker: "He kept remembering the weird, unlikely pleasure of being rolled onto his face and being [made violent love to] to within an inch of his sanity by someone bigger and stronger and possibly even hornier than himself." I WANT TO GO TO THERE.My favorite part of the book is the juxtaposition of the investigation of Elliot and Tucker’s feelings for each other and the investigation into the disappearance of two young college students. Elliot, Tucker and the reader spend the novel wondering what happened to these young men. Did they just take off and abandon their loved ones? Or was it something more sinister? Similarly Elliot and Tucker scrutinize their own feeling for each other – both feel abandoned by the other. Both feel that the other disappeared from their lives. Elliot, especially, uses the investigation as a way to explore the loss of his previous life and whether the end of that life means the end of his relationship with Tucker.I still have several questions about the mystery though. Which I can't list here without ticking people off about spoilers.I’m giving this book a very solid 4.25 stars, rounded down to 4. This is an excellent novel and I highly recommend it…but for me it didn’t hold that gut-punch of recognition I felt for the Adrien English series. Now that I’ve read that, I’m afraid every Josh Lanyon book will have to compete with it for first place in my heart.