Let’s Cheat!

Title & buy link: Let’s Cheat
Author: Gene Taylor
Cover Artist: Paul Richmond
Publisher: Dreamspinner
Amazon buy link: Let’s Cheat!
Genre: M/M contemporary
Length: Novel (200 pages)
Rating: 1 star out of 5

A guest review by Leslie S

Review summary: Great idea, bad execution.

Blurb
After nine years, Bradley Moore and Dr Matt Sharp are a little too secure in their relationship. In fact, they’re in a rut. But when the founder of Bradley’s law firm asks him to establish a branch office in Los Angeles, their predictable lives take a sharp left turn. Matt can’t just pick up and follow—there’s seniority and tenure to think about. If Matt stays in New York, they need a way to keep the spark alive. After racking his brain for a way to save their marriage, Matt finally suggests they cheat—with each other.

Before Bradley leaves, he and Matt take on New York City. They meet in unusual locations, play dress-up, and pretend to be strangers, all in the interest of spicing up their sex life. Their senses of humor and vivid imaginations lead to some interesting ‘cheating’—and occasionally get them into trouble.

Then Bradley moves to LA and becomes distracted by the lights of Hollywood. With him gone, the opportunity is ripe for Matt’s stalker to step in. Matt thought he and Bradley were doing well, but now Bradley’s gone when Matt needs him most.

Review
The blurb does a good job of describing the plot of this book, so I’m not going to rehash it here. If I’m honest, the blurb is probably the best thing about it.

I really, really wanted to love this, because the concept sounded like so much fun. I adore ‘first time’ stories, but I also enjoy ‘established relationship’ stories. When I saw the blurb for this one, I was excited—the promise of lots of roleplayed first times within the context of an established relationship. I couldn’t wait to read it!

Unfortunately, I didn’t like anything about the book. The characters are flat and lifeless to the point where I kept forgetting which one was Matt and which one was Brad. At times it’s only because they name-check one another so often (unrealistic even with a new couple, let alone a couple who’ve been together for so long) that I could identify the characters.

Matt veers towards TSTL territory on several occasions. He’s a tenured professor at university but acts like a high school teacher during his lectures. He’s very weepy and switches between being a complete uke to being something of a chick-with-a-dick. As for Brad, he’s a bit mouthy and seems to be the more adventurous of the pair, but neither of them have any strong defining characteristics that allow them to come alive on the page.

The supporting cast are similarly short-changed. Personalities are painted in the broadest of strokes and are often simply hung on a job description. Clarice is the fag hag neighbour, Elliot is the straight best friend, Grace and Winston are lawyers, Tyler is a Hollywood star, etc. There’s very little else to these people, and because of the author’s decision to tell everything rather than show it, the reader isn’t given the chance to connect or empathise with these characters.

The roleplay dates made me cringe. There was so much scope for this to be sexy and fun, and it just fell flat at every turn. On their first play-date in the library, Brad says he’s Charles Dickens and Matt says he’s Bill Clinton. Instead of going with it and creating a scenario out of the implausible meeting of those two men, the dialogue is wooden. So okay, it’s their first time doing roleplay so they’re nervous, I get that. But they don’t loosen up in any of their later dates. I don’t feel their passion, I’m not swept away into their make-believe. I’m just reading about two average guys making a hash out of trying to chat one another up in a really awkward way.

The best date was when they pretend to be conducting a drug deal at a gay biker bar. In another writer’s hands, this could have been a fantastic scene. Unfortunately, because the characters are so flat, not even this injection of external excitement could bring it to life.

Aside from the roleplay plot, there’s a series of rolling secondary plots that are simply one misunderstanding or easily resolved situation after another. The stalker is one such situation. It’s bigged up in the blurb, but when I got to that part of the book it just fizzled out into a dull resolution after a couple of chapters. And that’s not the only external conflict that doesn’t provide enough of the conflict. Matt and Brad’s separation—Matt in New York while Brad is in LA—should provide us with a riot of emotions and angst, but I didn’t feel any of it. Two men on a phone saying “I miss you” isn’t enough.

The pacing moves at glacial speed. To be frank, the wordcount could have been halved without losing any of the action. There was a lot of extraneous dialogue and narrative that could have been cut at the editing stage. But for me what really killed this book was the telling rather than showing. It bogs down the pacing, dulls the story, robs us of any element of surprise, blunts the characters’ emotions, and most of all, it denies us the characters themselves.

This is just my opinion and other readers may disagree, but I cannot recommend this book.