Romance and other things

REVIEW PUBLISHED AT DA, I PURCHASED THE BOOK

JK Lassiter moved to Dallas for a chance at a normal life. But normal is a hard thing to come by when he’s at the mercy of the rogue psychic power that robbed him of a decade of friendships and joy. At twenty-eight he’s finally making up for those lost years. He’s landed a job renovating a long-neglected house. He’s met eccentric neighbours, made new friends, and after sexy man-next-door, Nick Collier, shows up, he’s even begun to hope that romance might not be impossible. But when JK’s extra-sensory abilities reveal evidence of a brutal crime, he finds himself embroiled in a murder investigation and feels his dream of attaining a normal life slipping away again. Even worse, the list of suspects starts with JK’s new neighbours, his new friends, and, as far as the police are concerned, ends with Nick. Now with the lives of people he cares for on the line, JK he must fight to control the abilities he never wanted to hunt down a killer.

Review:

Dear Lane Robbins,

Your book was a very different read from what I usually get at Blind Eye Books. I cannot exactly call it a contemporary – the psychic powers that main character has make up a very important part of who he is, and they play an important role in the story. However, this is the *only* paranormal element in the book – if JK weren’t a psychic I would classify a book as “contemporary mystery with gay romantic subplot”.

Let me explain a little bit more about JK’s powers. When he touches people (or things) he can see their memories and the default situation is that he basically absorbs them. So you can imagine that if the memory is painful, it is something that he relives for a while, unless he works through it (and I actually was not quite sure what kinds of mental exercises he was doing to put such memories into the background of his mind, and even then, they were still there). Typing the last sentence, I realized that the only thing I am sure of is that JK can relive the memories through touch. These abilities did not make his life easy; in fact they made his life very hard. His parents basically kept him imprisoned in their basement for several years, not because they were horrible people, but because they wanted to keep him safe. That did not make JK’s sufferings any better, of course, and eventually he escaped to live with his older brother Jesse and Jesse’s wife Hannah.

“I don’t know,” JK said. “I don’t. I only got the gist, from the ground. His pain so bad it stained the dirt… You want to know how bad it can get? Nonstop episodes, me screaming and thrashing until I’m sedated. Locked in a basement so the world can’t get to me, sedated for days at a time. To keep me safe from myself. Clawing at the walls, my own skin, screaming my throat bloody. Nothing but other people’s nightmares. That’s how bad it gets.” His tight breathing savaged his vocal cords, made his words as ragged as if he’d been shouting.

I’ve been there, been that lunatic thing,” he whispered”.

JK is finally trying to build his own life, to live on his own, to deal with his abilities and to hold a job. Hannah is a psychiatrist and she is treating him (it is addressed that it is not ethical, but it is better than the alternative for JK because most people do not believe in his abilities and if he tells that to the other doctors he could be locked up forever). Hannah prescribes medication, which dulls down the ability somewhat, but it certainly does not go away. JK also always wears gloves.

We meet him when he begins to renovate a house in a small, tight-knit neighborhood in order for his boss to flip the house later on. It is a big opportunity for JK and his boss seems like a decent guy who has taken a chance on him. Very quickly JK learns that the neighborhood he now lives in (he lives in the house while he is doing renovation) is one where everybody knows each other’s secrets.

Gloves or no gloves, JK picks up some dark feelings, dark memories from the house – apparently the guy who used to live in there just took off one day with his dogs, and nobody in the neighborhood seems to miss him. JK however has a feeling that the guy was murdered, and he turns out to be right because eventually he digs out the body from the backyard.

It is clear that somebody in this lively neighborhood murdered him, and matters are getting complicated because the guy (Barton) used to terrorize the people living there. He harassed everybody – his wife, his neighbor Nick, some young women living nearby. Even now, when it comes to light that he is dead, nobody seems to be sorry.

But JK feels the terror Barton felt when he died and he thinks his murderer needs to be brought to justice. Of course things get more and more complicated when JK gets to know his neighbor Nick better, becomes attracted to him, and learns just how much terror Nick experienced because Barton was living nearby.

The question of who is the murderer is not terribly complicated, but it is not obvious right away either – I think the author went for “the least suspicious person” resolution and I liked it fine. The main reason why I liked this book was JK. I liked him and respected him, I admired his quest for independence, and I wanted him to achieve his goals. I also liked his relationship with his super protective older brother Jesse, but I wanted him to get on his own two feet and was glad when it happened.

The romance storyline did not work so well for me. Do not get me wrong, I liked Nick, who is a quiet history professor, and I thought he and JK had the potential to be really good together. I enjoyed their interactions, but there was one thing that happened which I did not expect to dislike. The attraction between the guys happens quickly enough (over the course of the week I believe) but it was not handled in a ridiculous way – it stems from their desire to get to know each other better and it doesn’t result in their getting married at the end.

But JK is a newcomer to the neighborhood, and over and over again Nick takes his friend’s side over JK’s (Nick has a best friend who lives nearby). On the one hand it made perfect sense to me and it worked for the narrative – Nick’s friend is like his brother (JK compares it to his relationship to Jesse), and he has only known JK for a few days. But I kept thinking, here is the guy you are clearly attracted to, and your friend kind of mistreats him (only verbally) repeatedly, but you just shrug it off. I think it is not Nick’s behavior per se that bothered me because they met so recently (although forcing JK to do some extra investigation when JK told him that it could cause pretty much a breakdown did bother me a bit). No, it is that I wondered at the end just how strong their relationship would be in the months or years to come. Even though we are shown that a few months later they are moving in together, I still wondered about whether they would be able to withstand whatever life will throw at them. I definitely want to be proven wrong though.

Grade B-