After Midnight

Title: After Midnight
Author: Santino Hassell
Cover artist:
Publisher: Self published
Amazon: Buy Link After Midnight
Genre: romance/dystopia/adventure
Length:267 pages
Rating: 4.25 out of 5

A guest review by Sirius

Summary: Dark romance in a post World War Three settings between two very flawed characters which sucked me in.

Blurb:

Gordon Frost is a survivor. He survived a war that ravaged the nation, and he made it through the orphanages and crime-ridden slums that followed. With few prospects for the future, Gordon carved out a niche for himself in the expanding drug trade of Lexington, PA. It’s not pretty, but it’s his, and it beats what he was doing before. But a classic case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time results in a brush with death, going by the name of Adam. Afterward, the life that seemed good enough before, isn’t quite the same.

Adam Blake is an assassin on the brink of being terminated by the very organization that controls him. He completed his mission, but not without being seen. With his secrets in danger of being exposed by Gordon, Adam knows he should kill the smart-mouthed redhead, but finds himself intrigued by the troublesome civilian instead.

When Gordon’s knack for finding trouble combines with the dangerous consequences of Adam’s indecision, their worlds intertwine in an explosive way.

Review:

This book was a recommendation from fellow reviewer. I have never heard anything about this author, never read this novel or his epic saga “In the Company of Shadows” when it was/(is?) free online, so I was very curious.

The book sucked me in from the very beginning and of course because it contained some flavor of “from enemies to lovers” trope I was a very happy reader. The dark post World War Three settings were very well done – enough for me to be able to clearly imagine that world especially since in many ways it reminded me of our world .

And yes, the writer made me feel for Gordon – somebody who fought for survival since he was a child and who coped with the world around him by both keeping his head down and using sarcasm to lash out at the first real or imagined possibility that somebody could have attacked him. Gordon lost his family, friends, spent years on the street, was extremely tired of drug trading and still fought tooth and nail to stay alive. I could at least feel for him, if not respect him and that was not a small feat to accomplish.

The circumstances under which he and Adam met made me hold my breath and actually roll my eyes a little bit at Adam’s supposed competency as an assassin for a mysterious Agency, but I definitely could not deny that Adam and Gordon had tons of chemistry from the moment they met, so I decided to try very hard to go with the flow. I decided that hey, for the purposes of love story Adam’s desire to not kill Gordon should be more important than his work for the Agency, no matter how incompetent he looked because of that to me.

It is interesting to me to think about contradictory reaction I was having to the setup of the story because of course had the Adam decided to kill Gordon to protect himself, then two things would have happened – we would have had no story and more importantly I would have truly, deeply and irrevocably hated him. But I still cannot figure out from the analytical point of view whether I liked that setup or not. I liked it as a set up for truly great dialogue, for the bickering that did not feel contrived to me not even once during the course of the story, but as I said above, Adam got no brownie points from me for his work efficiency.

Here is a sample of their conversations for you to let you get some feel for the writing:

This time, Adam was visibly annoyed. “How are we ever going to come to an understanding if you don’t behave reasonably? I am at least making an attempt to rectify this situation with minimum damage to your being.” “Minimum dam – Wh-what planet are you from? You’re seriously, like, fucked up in the brain.” Adam turned the car in an abrupt U-turn that disrupted the traffic around them. Several horns honked in unison and at least one person shouted out their window. The wheels squeaked in protest against the road, and they began heading west. “Wow, dude. Learn to drive” “A critique of my driving skills is unnecessary at this junction in the conversation.” “Then stop driving like a psychopath”.

I guess that even better testament to the writer’s talent would be that he almost sold Adam to me, and that indeed was a huge accomplishment. Pretty much already in the middle of the story I was easily going along and thinking that in that hard world they live Adam probably had no other choices but to go work for the Agency if he wanted to survive but for the different reasons than Gordon. And look, he did not kill Gordon because he felt sorry for him and his kill for the Agency that we knew of was a bad person anyway, and whoever he killed he did it because it is good for the Government. I hope I am not sounding sarcastic, because I am not, up till the last two chapters of the story I was pretty much feeling sympathy for Adam, even if not exactly admiring his choice of trade.

But just when I thought that the writer would go relatively easy on me – we learn something about Adam’s past, which made me feel very unsettled. I guess there are some things I could not swallow in the characters no matter how dark the world they live in and how much they have to adjust to that world in order to survive in it.
I still could not stop caring about these two guys, which is truly amazing as far as I am concerned, but I am afraid I could not like Adam anymore – that murder from his past was unforgivable to me.

I have no idea whether the writer envisioned this story as a romance first and foremost, but to me this is what it was, even if it was on the darker side of things. I think that based on the blurb I expected more of the adventure actually take place than what we saw, but because whatever was happening moved the romance forward very well, I was satisfied enough. However as I said before, I did not think that Adam was a very competent agent at the beginning of the story and the ending did not change my opinion on that. I wonder if that was the intent or not.

But I really loved how as the story progressed both men got more and more insights into each other, and how they slowly realized that they wanted to be in each other’s life, needed more from each other. Of course I was wondering whether their character development was mostly to show how they stopped being clueless and realized that they want more from each other, because this is what Adam was thinking around 40% of the story on my kindle. In my opinion one spends so much time thinking of the person only if they are very interested in that person.

“Gordon was troublesome and irritating, but also amusing and an unceasing source of curiosity for Adam. He’d spent enough hours analyzing Gordon’s expressions, the intonations in his voice, and the ever-changing look in his hazel eyes, to know that the joker act was a cover for something dark, lonely and unsatisfied. Why Gordon acted the fool for everyone, Adam couldn’t say. But as the days went by, he found himself wanting to rip the façade away”

So, in my opinion romance was done well, paced well, not overburdened with sex (but what was there was very hot to me), which made sense to me and the HFNish ending also made perfect sense. The men have so much on their plate that HEA ending would not have felt real to me.

I thought secondary characters were great – especially Gordon’s boss Chance and Carla was awesome too. Chance did not inspire any love, but I thought he was very well drawn and not caricature like at all.

Recommended.