Rating: ★★★★★★★★☆☆ 

A former police officer turned private investigator, Nick Nowak is haunted by his abrupt departure from the department, as well as, the traumatic end of his relationship with librarian Daniel Laverty. In these three stories set in Chicago during the early eighties, Nick locates a missing young man for a mysterious client, solves a case of arson at a popular nightspot, and goes undercover to prove a dramatic suicide was actually murder.

When he isn’t detecting, and sometimes when he is, Nick moves through a series of casual relationships. But his long suppressed romantic side surfaces when he meets Detective Bert Harker. Will he give love another chance? Or, will he continue to bury himself in the arms of strangers?

My review:

This collection of novellas introduces the reader to Nick Nowak, former cop and now PI in the traditional hard-boiled mould. Smokes too much, and eats too much junk food? Check. Loves Jazz? Check. Cynical about love? Check. Sad past? Check. Difficult relationship with the police? Check.

And yet he’s not that typical. He was never a super-powered detective, just a lowly beat cop. The bad relationship with the police is mostly with members of his homophobic Polish family, who harrass him for the shame of being gay. He lost his job because he was forcibly outed by his boyfriend, whom he still loves and misses, not because of internal police corruption. And cynical he might be about love – or claim to be – but he’s still looking, albeit in all the wrong places.

This is not m/m. It’s not even romance, despite slight glimmers of hope in Nick’s rather dreary existence.  It’s gay fiction, with gay male readers in mind, I suspect, with the frequent (and frankly, from my perspective, rather dull) meaningless sexual encounters with everyone from friends to people in the same building where he’s making enquiries. (Nick just seems to exude a perpetual ‘up for it’ pheromone.) The emotional tone is deliberately muffled, and even though it’s told from Nick’s POV, he remains strangely opaque, though there’s a progression in our knowledge and his development from the first story to the third. (There are two more collections, both available from Torquere, and I guess we learn even more about Nick as we read more.) It’s that opacity which makes these stories somewhat less satisfying than they could be. The setting is the height of the pre-AIDS gay era, where gay men had more to fear from homophobes than diseases. However, the setting never really came alive for me. Nick’s shutdown emotionality infects the entire narrative and tone, leading to a curiously distant experience for the reader. By the end of this collection, I was mildly curious about Nick’s future, hopeful of an eventual HEA for him, but he hadn’t stamped himself as an individual the way a Sam Spade does, or even a Samantha Moon. Being a gay detective in fiction isn’t – at least any more – isn’t enough on its own to make a character memorable. Nick doesn’t have anything else to distinguish himself.

Thornton’s writing is very tight indeed, spare and economical, and beautifully edited (a minor miracle considering the publisher.) He’s clearly an author of skill and strong dedication to research. This is a collection of stories which offers a good deal to enjoy, provided one takes it for what it is and doesn’t expect what it is not, i.e. a gay romance. Well worth a look.

Rating: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ 

Can they stop the killer before things go horribly wrong? Or are they already too late?

My review (spoilers ahoy!):
I have a confession to make. Ms Zheng sent this book to me over a month ago, and I read it then, but my reaction was so much not what I expected from an work by an author I normally enjoy, I didn’t know what to do. It didn’t help that the reaction to this book in other quarters has been universally favourable, although I very often don’t agree with those quarters.

But the long and short of it is that I read it again, and I still had problems. So, bearing in mind that my reaction seems to be atypical, I have no choice but to say, I really didn’t like this story.

Why? For a start, I don’t like infidelity, and while Vic was allegedly fine with Tomas’s job (although he wasn’t really), it made me squirm. I hated the way Tomas would come back from a session with Jon and crawl into bed with Vic unwashed. It seemed so…insensitive and cruel.

But even setting that aside, Tomas and Vic behave like idiots. They don’t talk. They run away from each other. Tomas books an all nighter with Jon, who’s clearly an abusive sadist who doesn’t respect or understand the concept of real consent – which leads to my other big, big ick about this story. The scenes between Tomas and Jon are supposed to be erotic, but all I could think was that Tomas hadn’t really consented at all. Being paid while being coerced by threats to his job or his friends or even Vic, isn’t a replacement. This isn’t BDSM. It verges on actual rape. This isn’t erotic to me.

The same lack of credibility infused the rest of the story. Jon’s bahviour at work towards Vic didn’t make sense, neither did his obsession about remaining closeted. Vic and Tomas seemed to have a very tenuous basis for their relationship, one which falls apart at the first nudge. They all felt like people playing roles to which they were ill-suited, forced down paths of behaviour that the author needed rather than what grew organically from the characters themselves.

The writing was also less smooth than I expected from this author, and that only added to my lack of engagement with the story. The POV swings around, and the writing is overpadded.

As is probably clear, if you can swallow the central premise and relationship, you will enjoy this story very much more than I did. I can hardly say this is a bad story, or not worth your time. I simply didn’t enjoy it very much, and I, as I’ve repeatedly said, am a sour old bag

Rating: ★★★★★★★☆☆☆ 

Film student Micah Malone learns the hard way that when life sucks, you can’t just yell “Cut! Let’s do another take!”

His grades are a box-office bomb. His friends create more drama than a soap opera. And his love life needs a laughtrack. While there’s no script to dictate what happens next, can Micah find the direction he needs? Life, after all, is no film school project. But it is great source material. The only source material.

Let the cameras roll. Micah’s quirky story has begun filming.

My review:

This is a quirky little novel told in an engaging and unusual manner, more like a scrapbook for a film project than a linear narrative. It works very well for the story and the principal narrator, Micah. Micah is  an insecure gay film student whose world revolves around his friends and his intermittent and hitherto largely unsatisfying sexual encounters. A series of events jolts him out of his set course, and shakes up the small group of constant (if constantly bickering) companions.

On the surface level, this is an enjoyable book. If you just want a fairly light, unchallenging and often amusing read from a writer with a good deal of style and polish, then this is for you and you should stop reading this review right now because I’m a sour old bag and am likely to ruin it for you.

Right – you’ve been warned. Here be spoilers.

[spoiler space]

[spoiler space]

The problem with Micah’s story is Micah. He’s, to put it bluntly, a twit. And not just a twit, a selfish, rather cruel and entirely self-absorbed twit. He treats one former lover with unbelievable callousness, and breaks up with another over a trival misunderstanding which likely had devastating consequences for that lover, but which ceases to trouble Micah as soon as he finds out about it. He reacts to the discovery of one friend’s serious depression mostly by wondering how it will affect his friendship. He reacts to the serious disabling injury of a potential lover by walking out on the man in disgust. He’s the kind of shallow, vacuous twink that gives shallow vacuous twinks a bad name.

His friends aren’t much better – despite his dependence on them, I couldn’t discern the charm of Trish (as self-centered as Micah), or the Pauls. Stan is the kind of nerd who makes you want to slap them, although his attraction for Micah is at least well-described and shown vividly. Ironically, I would have enjoyed this story much more if the focus had been more on Stan, and especially on Jasper, the story’s token villain, and the only person who actually had a reason to be a dick. Poor Jasper.

Conflicts are dealt with far too easily. Micah finds new lovers with surprising ease, given his history and personality. Trish’s depression is cured by love (it doesn’t work like that.) A court trial is settled before it starts. Even the lover with the serious disability is on prosthetics far more quickly and easily than one might expect, and the realities of how he copes and how it affects its life is barely and badly described.

So on a deeper level, this is a story about a group of people not worth my time, and not worthy of the obvious skill lavished on them by the author, who has a real flair for words (despite some horrible line errors – eg “you’re” for ‘your’, “peaked” for “piqued”). If you don’t think too hard about your reading, you’ll love this, but I grew incredibly impatient with Micah about half way through and couldn’t regain any engagement with him. Hence the rating – the novel deserves more for writing craft, but less for enjoyment. As always, your mileage will definitely vary, and it is, at the very least, a novel out of the ordinary in this genre.