Pas De Deux

Title: Pas De Deux
Author: Jamie Craig
Publisher: Amber Allure
Genre: M/M Contemporary, Mystery, Romance.
Length: 200 pages
Rating: 3.75 stars out of 5

A guest review by Jenre

THE BLURB

Hotshot defense attorney James Scott isn’t afraid of following his gut instinct. Even when his gut tells him that the man everybody knows is guilty is not only innocent, but a victim himself. A notorious media darling, he’s got an irresistible charm that always seems to undermine his strategic mind. Homicide detective Owen Duke dislikes him before they meet. Duke doesn’t have time for gut feelings—he lives by logic and evidence. And all the evidence tells him that Scott’s client, Hector Young, is guilty of the cold-blooded murder of a young ballerina.

Scott is willing to risk his reputation and his career on the kid’s innocence. Relentless, he convinces Duke to dig beneath the surface of the case. What’s supposed to be an open-and-shut case quickly becomes a quagmire of lies, murder, and rotting corruption. Suddenly, instead of being a thorn in Duke’s side, James Scott is the only person in San Francisco the detective can trust. And the two of them are the only people who can find the truth in time to save the life of an innocent man…

THE REVIEW

Somtimes you read a book and it’s fantastic, other times it can be very poor but most often you read books that can only be described as ‘OK’. There may be nothing much wrong with the book, but it just didn’t claim your attention to any degree and is easy forgotten once you’ve finished it. For me Pas De Deux was one such book.

At the beginning we are introduced to Detective Owen Duke who has been assigned the murder of a ballerina. It seems a cut and dried case, but there’s a problem. Hot shot lawyer, James Scott, has decided that the accused man is innocent and being set up and he’s going to stop at nothing to prove the man’s innocence. Working together James and Owen discover a conspiracy to cover up evidence and condemn an innocent man.

I said at the beginning that this was an ‘OK’ book. In terms of plotting and pacing, I couldn’t fault it. The story is engaging and clips along at a reasonable pace as the reader is taken through the various stages of the heroes’ relationship and the clues leading to the denouement of the mystery. Jamie Craig always writes well and the characters’ feelings and motivations were described in detail. The amount of dialogue to internal musing was balanced and as always, the sex scenes were hot, but also romantic.

There were two areas which contributed greatly to my lacklustre response to the book. Firstly the characters of Owen and James were very much of a type seen many times in m/m mystery books. Owen is a hard-working cop, who is diligent and not afraid to stand up for his principles. James is a well respected lawyer who works all the hours he can, is brilliant in court, and takes any lost cases too much to heart. Actually, this is pretty much all we find out about these men because they are defined solely by their careers.  They have no family, Owen doesn’t seem to have friends and James only has one friend/f**k buddy, who appears when it’s necessary to further the plot. It’s as though they existed only in the sphere of their work. Even their apartments are lacking in character, being just tidy places to live – or a convenient place for a sex scene. There was one point when James arrived at Owen’s apartment for the first time and saw that he had lots of photographs in frames and I did think that there might have been a discussion about who the people were in the photos, leading to at least some extra information to flesh out Owen’s character. Sadly though, the photographs were never mentioned again. This lack of information about the men had the effect that I lost interest in them fairly quickly. There were no interesting quirks about them; no hook to keep my attention. As a result, when it came to the scenes were their lives were in danger, I read it with a certain distance. The same with the end. I was happy for their hea, but I wasn’t emotionally engaged in it.

The other area which made me scratch my head a little was in the mystery/suspense plot itself. Very early on in the story Owen and James start comparing notes on the murder case that Owen is investigating, even though they are, in effect, on opposite sides. I wasn’t entirely sure that this would actually happen in real life or even be allowed. I went with it though, because I don’t really know about these things. Another point is that Owen is working on a very high profile murder case and yet seems to be alone. He may have been in charge of the investigation, but where were all the underlings who should have been helping him chase up leads? Owen and James just existed in this bubble where they seemed to be able to disregard all accepted protocol, abandon anything else they may have been working on and concentrate on this one case and each other. By the time it got to the ‘oh, that’s convenient’ big reveal, I’d basically given up pretending that this plot was anything like real life.

So, although Pas De Deux was a well written story, the lack of depth in the characterisation and the glaring anomolies in the mystery made this a book which I couldn’t wholeheartedly recommend. Those readers who love Jamie Craig’s books will probably love this as well but I have read much better by this pair of authors.