Review: Beautiful story of a man in transition
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 03 15, 2014
Landry's Review at Mrs Condit & Friends review blog: “Fair Game” tells the tale of Elliot Mills, a man in transition. He used to be a top FBI agent in the Pacific Northwest until an on-the-job injury forced him to start over as a college history professor in his Washington state hometown. Everything is new for him but not much is necessarily better. He likes teaching and loves being near his dad-his only remaining relative- but being an agent for the Bureau was his dream career and he was good at it. When a gunshot wound forced him out of field work, he knew he was not suited for a desk job. So he walked away from that life and everyone who was a part of it—-and that included fellow agent and new lover Tucker Lance.Elliot was just learning to accept his new, quieter life when he reluctantly agreed to his father’s request to help old family friends search for their missing son, a student at the college where he taught. Elliot is drawn deeper into the case when he realizes that they are more victims involved. Soon the FBI is called in and Elliot is forced to swallow a lot of personal issues and deal with his old flame, Special Agent Lance. I know this book is about the mystery Elliot and Tucker are brought together to solve. But, personally, I found it more interesting to uncover and understand the whole story behind the prior romance that the two main characters shared before Elliot’s injury. Telling this personal story did not happen fast. In fact, because so little was explained in the beginning of the book, I originally thought that this was a later installment in a series. I checked and it wasn’t. This was simply the author’s choice to slowly let us, the readers, in on the exact nature of their relationship, how it developed and eventually fell apart. It caught and held my interest because I wanted to know! But, honestly, I would have liked to know more sooner. Knowing the back story helped me to understand and like Tucker so much more. It also made it easier to relate to Elliot even if I did not always agree with the choices he made. He certainly has what it takes to be a top-notch cop. He was always a step ahead of everyone else, except of course the perpetrator, at least until the very end. Elliot figured out “whodunit” but in my eyes, it was the tiniest piece of evidence possible that lead him to identify the guilty party. Still, the crime wave was stopped and Elliot and Tucker had time to talk and come to a new understanding. I enjoyed author Josh Lanyon’s descriptive writing skills. His words created beautiful visions of the Washington State area. I could picture the scenery but I did have to check a state map to understand the distance between the different locations he mentioned. There were many characters introduced but I was disappointed that we didn’t learn much about the victims, especially the first young man Elliot was asked to help find. I didn’t feel any real personal sympathies for him, no sense of loss because he was really just a name, not a person. There were several possible suspects discussed and when the culprit was revealed, it was not the person I first suspected so, as a mystery, the story worked fine for me. This mystery seemed to be the main focus of the book but it was the romance between Elliot and Tucker that I enjoyed the most. Having the two men come together and work out their differences was the outcome I most anticipated and in the end, I was rewarded.