Placing Out

Title & buy link: Placing Out
Author: P.A. Brown
Cover Artist: Trace Edward Zaber
Publisher: Amber Quill/Amber Allure
Genre: M/M historical
Length: Novella (132 pages, 36,000 words)
Rating: 4.75 stars out of 5

A guest review by Leslie S

Review summary: A compelling narrative voice and a solid sense of history bring this story leaping into life.

Blurb
At the age of ten, Dylan Daniels was a placed-out kid sent from New York’s Five Points to a family in Nebraska. But Dylan ran away at the age of eighteen when he realized he preferred boys and didn’t want to be a farmer. Once he made his way to Hollywood, he wound up as a popular and high-class hustler with a number of wealthy clients.

Now in 1933 near the end of the Prohibition Era in America, Dylan meets Ben Carter during a bar raid. Ben, who’s a six-year veteran of the LAPD and deeply in the closet, is instantly both attracted and repelled by this beautiful man. Between them they struggle to overcome the barriers that keep them apart, including Dylan’s career, and Ben being in a brutal squad that frequently raids pansy bars and beats the patrons, which tears Ben apart.

Will Ben let Dylan’s love heal him or destroy him altogether?

Review
We first meet Dylan as a young tearaway in New York. With his mother dead and his elder sister married and unwilling to care for him, Dylan is finally abandoned by his father when he gets too much to handle. Frequently in trouble with the police, Dylan is ‘placed out’ (fostered) to a family in Nebraska. The Chatterfields have plenty of children of their own and Sean is bullied, but as he grows older and stronger he becomes useful around the farm. He also grows up to be a good-looking young man. One of the daughters makes eyes at him, but Dylan realises his interest is not in girls but boys, especially one of the Chatterfield boys, Caleb. They fool around but it’s only when Dylan first sees Rudolph Valentino at the movies that he realises how much he’s attracted to men. He decides to leave Nebraska and set out for Hollywood.

But Hollywood isn’t quite what he expected. Dylan discovers that a lot of men will pay for the chance to spend some time with him, and he quickly reinvents himself from a street hustler to an expensive whore, complete with expensive tastes in clothes and food. He never lets his dreams rule his head and always knows he could lose everything in a second, so he’s careful to stash away some money for the time when his looks fade.

LAPD cop Ben is a good man caught in a bad situation. His job isn’t easy but he gains satisfaction from helping people. He’s got morals, but he also hides his true self. On his few off-duty hours, he spends time in ‘pansy bars’ with his occasional-but-not-serious lover, Kevin.

Ben is a man on the move and hopes to make Lieutenant by the time he’s 35, so when his superior asks him to help stamp out the ‘Commies’, he agrees – and is horrified to discover himself taking part in a raid on the bar he usually frequents. He manages to save Kevin from arrest, but the other bar regulars aren’t so lucky. Ben is ashamed of himself for participating in the raids, which only increase as time goes on, but at the same time he has to protect himself. If any of his colleagues knew he was secretly gay, not only would he be kicked out of the police, he’d probably be beaten to within an inch of his life or maybe even killed.

Dylan and Ben are flung together during one of these raids. Ben is shocked by his attraction to Dylan, who dresses like a gentleman and talks with real intelligence. Dylan recognises that Ben is gay and taunts him with knowledge of their mutual attraction, even giving Ben his address. Increasingly confused by his desire and about to reach breaking point due to the stresses of work, Ben doesn’t know which way to turn. As events unfold, Ben has to make a decision – one that could cost him everything he’s worked so hard to achieve.

Placing Out is a strong story with a very real sense of time and place. I don’t know much about American history during the Prohibition so the closest thing I can compare this to is Jed Rubenfeld’s novels, which are set in New York of the 1920s, but what I like in Rubenfeld’s work is also present here, especially in Ben’s scenes within the LAPD. Things are dirty and amoral and the politics are twisted and confusing. It’s easy to see how an essentially good man can be dragged into horrible circumstances where he has no choice to go along with his orders.

The chapters and scenes shift between Dylan’s first person POV and Ben’s third person POV. I loved Dylan’s narrative. His voice is strong and defiant and perfectly matches his character. You get a real sense of progression, not just of a young lad growing up, but also the way he relates to the world, how he understands his sexuality, and how he arrives at his decisions. I’m not a big fan of first person POV but I would happily have read an entire novel just from Dylan’s POV because it’s so compelling.

Ben is very different in personality, and I’m glad the author decided to use third person POV for his side of the story because it gives the reader that added distance that’s necessary during scenes when Ben’s anger is unleashed in violence. I really felt for him and the decisions he had to make. He has to hide so much of himself and it’s such a struggle for him to accept Dylan’s affection and love, and of course it’s made worse by the fact that Dylan is a hooker.

I winced at one thing – I’m not going to give it away but you’ll know it when you see it – and I hoped it wasn’t going to be a case of ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’ for these characters!

Overall I’d recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a good historical. The only problem I had with it was I felt the pacing was a bit off in the final third or so, when a lot of things started happening and the POV switches were a little too fast for me to fully appreciate the characters’ emotions. Authors probably hate it when readers say this, but I do honestly wish this had been at least category length rather than novella length, because Dylan and Ben were such strong characters and in my opinion the story was powerful enough to have sustained a great word count. Nevertheless, a recommended read.