Deconstruction

Title & buy link: Deconstruction
Author: Kit Zheng
Cover Artist: Unknown
Publisher: Aspen Mountain Press
Genre: M/M contemporary
Length: Novella (112 pages)
Rating: 4.75 stars out of 5

A guest review by Leslie S

Review summary: A fast-paced emotional rollercoaster with a great mix of angst, sex, and characters you’ll really root for.

Blurb
Escort Tomas and homicide detective Vic have been together three years and expect many more–until Vic’s case, a string of hustler murders, hits too close to home. While Vic grows more tense and distant, Tomas finds himself increasingly tangled in the erotic games of a client, Jon, who plays on Tomas’s most secret needs. When the killer strikes at the club where Tomas works as a dancer, everything spins into a dizzying mix of sex and love, miscommunication and murder.

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

Review
Tomas is a gorgeous, in-demand dancer and escort at a popular gay club. The money is good and he’s always been able to keep his home life separate from his working life. His partner Vic, a cop, may not like Tomas’ job but he doesn’t openly complain about it. The two men met at the club so it’s not like Vic didn’t know what he letting himself in for when he first started dating Tomas.

But recently Vic has started pulling away and becoming emotionally distant. Tomas is afraid that their relationship might be on the rocks and he thinks his job is part of the issue. Vic tells him it’s because of a case he’s working on – a serial killer is on the loose, murdering male prostitutes. Vic is especially troubled because all the victims have been blond, and Tomas, with his Scandinavian heritage, is a prime target. So far, the victims have all been lone hookers and junkies, not anyone from an organised bar or club, but Vic can’t help but worry for his lover’s safety.

His concern angers Tomas, who feels that Vic is trying to smother and control him. Both men have problems talking about their emotions, and their respective jobs don’t exactly help matters. Vic has always tried to be respectful of Tomas’ clients’ right to privacy, but he’s infuriated by the knowledge that one of Tomas’ johns is a bent cop. Vic has often asked Tomas for the man’s name but Tomas refuses to give it, and the tension between them increases when Vic discovers that the bent cop has been leading Tomas into kinky, risky sex.

Jon, the bent cop, has been taking bribes from the owner of the club to arrest any troublesome dancers. He’s very much in the closet and is known as a homophobe in the police department. Jon enjoys the power he has over the dancers, and he gains particular enjoyment from humiliating Tomas. He coerces Tomas to do things that are beyond Tomas’ established limits for the relationship between escort and john, and while Tomas revels in the sex, he’s also ashamed and guilty, which of course makes him want it more. Jon makes him do things he hasn’t done with Vic, and though Tomas knows it’s wrong, he can’t stop himself from getting even more involved.

The two threads of Tomas’ life come together, and Vic and Tomas are forced to re-evaluate their relationship. Jon’s power games take a sickening twist, and then the serial killer strikes again…

I’ve read and enjoyed Kit Zheng’s work before, and this delivers just as much as earlier stories. There’s a smoothness, a flow to the writing that makes it so easy to read, but at the same time there’s an emotional crunch to it, too. And boy, does this book give an emotional crunch.

There’s no doubt that some readers won’t like this at all. You can probably tell if you’ll like it or not from the blurb and what I’ve written above. Tomas is an escort. He’s in a committed long-term relationship but he has sex with other men. Now usually I don’t like reading about infidelity or open relationships or what-have-you, but it really works here because Tomas is so open about it. It’s what he does, period. What he’s not open about is his motivations for being an escort. Whenever he reconsiders what he’s doing, he tells himself it’s for the money, and because it’s easy – certainly easier than using his degree and becoming a lawyer. This is probably the only issue I had with the book as a whole – we’re given these characters unvarnished, we see them as they are in that moment, but we don’t get much of a sense of their motivation. In a novella this is more of a niggle than a major issue, but it did stop me from giving this 5 stars, because I really wanted to understand Tomas’ thought processes and his emotional reactions, especially when it came to the way he acted with Jon.

Anyway, I liked both Tom and Vic, though at times I wanted to bang their heads together. Recently on the site we had a discussion about The Big Misunderstanding in M/M books and I guess this story could also be considered as having Big Misunderstandings because the guys just. do. not. TALK! Or if they do talk, they do it like real men and snap and snarl at each other 😆 and while they do respect each other, they kind of don’t at the same time – they try to give each other space at the loss of their own needs, and as such it’s a salutary lesson on how not to give so much of yourself away to your lover and to keep the lines of communication open!

Jon is a real scumbag. He’s creepy and sleazy and a hypocrite who enjoys hurting Vic emotionally. He gets off on sexually humiliating Tomas, and the scene that made me want to look away (but I couldn’t – it’s horribly compelling but brilliantly written) was when he buys Tomas for the whole night, takes him to a public toilet in a park, and forces him to have sex with two strangers. Although Tomas agrees to it in principle, there’s a very fine line here between consensual and non-con, so be warned. It’s a disturbing scene but as I said, it’s brilliantly written – Tomas gets physical pleasure from it but he’s also completely detached from what’s happening to him, and he’s trying to process his own desires with every other emotion. Very twisted and complicated, and very clever.

The plot with the serial killer is nicely managed and provides an underlying menace to the whole story, ramping up the tension at just the right moments. I’m not going to say more because of spoilers, but I really liked the connection Tomas makes when he realises who the killer must be. I’m not sure that the thing with the mobile phones would really work, but to be honest I didn’t really care by that point as I was invested in the characters and was reading at high speed to see what happened next!

All the characters are flawed in believable ways, and it’s their realism that makes them so strong and memorable. Kit Zheng’s writing and storytelling sucked me into this story and kept me glued to the page. It’s not always an easy read, and sometimes it’s downright disturbing, but if you like gritty, challenging books then I recommend this.