Reviewed by Nina

TITLE: A Dangerous Man
AUTHOR: Anne Brooke
PUBLISHER: Amber Allure Press
LENGTH: 233 pages, 96k words
BLURB: Michael Jones, a young gay artist and part-time hooker, will do anything to stage his first exhibition. When he falls in love with rich financier Jack Hutchinson, he seems set to achieve his goal. But as Michael becomes caught between the unforgiving territory of smoky-bar Hackney and the green-garden luxury of upper class London, the consequences of his uncompromising pursuit leave him having to fight for all he holds dear, and in the only way he knows how.

REVIEW:

I’m drawing a blank. (But I can feel the rant building up.)

There’s so much I could say about this book – but there’s also nothing to say about it, really, except that it was pretty much a waste of my time.

If you want a basic description, a review in four words, I can give you this: unexplained, unconvincing, unreasonable, unresolved. Yet despite all the bad stuff, there were some sentences, underneath all the rubbish, that had me thinking there might be something more to this story than a whiny parasite of a protagonist and an aimless plot – some sort of greater scheme, glimpsed through parallels between different relationships and rare attempts at real introspection nipped in the bud.

All in all, though? This was not a success, starting with the main character.

Michael is a self-pitying, sick, deranged, greedy and entitled individual – basically the sort of character that in the hands of a better writer could have become a gorgeous, captivating monster, but only managed to annoy me and frustrate me here, because all the potential evil in him is held up by a weak personality. He’s also ignorant, needy, superficial and generally pathetic – I could go on forever.

His reasons don’t hold, his traumatic past stays untold until the very end (where, I guess, we’re supposed to “get it” and finally understand everything. Don’t hold your breath), he sees himself as worthy of everything and at the same time worthless. He’s volatile, claiming all he wants is Jack, then lying to him, hurting him and using him to get his other life dream, a gallery all of his own, then again proclaiming his all-encompassing, enduring love for Jack.

This does not make for a complex, intriguing character – this is plain inconsistency.

As for the other characters, they’re simple cardboard cut-outs. There’s the beautiful, goodhearted young lady, the abusive, cheating asshole, the kind, pleasant man with a hidden mean streak, the upper-class, cultured, beautiful businessman who’s everything that is good in the world and so on and so forth.

None of these characters has any depth beyond their basic role in the plot.

Oh, yes, the plot. What plot?

The plot is a meandering mess of aimless wandering through the seedy side of London and Jack’s beautiful house in Islington (and be prepared for a lot of gushing over said house in Islington, in case you want to read this, because it’s magnificent. And elegant. And rich), all the while watching Michael divide his time between drawing, gushing about his own art and selling his body for money he could earn much more easily by getting a job at a fucking supermarket and stopping with the whining.

Do you want to see a stupid, entitled git have mental breakdowns for no reason, lie to the love of his life (excuse me while I rofl) and describe his creative process in 3649 different ways, all heaped with adjectives, adverbs and metaphors, always saying the same three things (namely: 1. I never know what I’m going to draw before I draw it, 2. I don’t do colours, and 3. I can’t show anyone this stuff, because then they’d have power over me – may I point out, btw, that exposing your drawings in a fucking gallery kind of defies the purpose of not showing them to anyone before then) for 233 pages? Then go for it. You’ll love this book.

The writing is not bad, per se, but the only thing that could have saved the book for me at this point is capturing, masterful prose – which this most certainly isn’t.

I could see the author was trying. Hard. But… eh, it didn’t work.

“Waves of dislike, hot and red, flowed between Mrs. Hutchinson and me like blood.”

This doesn’t make me go “aahhh” – it makes me go “wtf”.

All the way to the end, the narration kept becoming more and more repetitive, which is a fire-sure way to lose my attention – and I wasn’t even all that invested to begin with.

Aside from sheer aesthetic qualities, the writing is lacking on the technical side too. The story is full of inconsistencies, imprecisions and elements that don’t have an actual role in the storyline, as if the author added them and then promptly forgot about them.

Anne Brooke: you don’t use your voice to whistle, drawings made of sharp lines and “raw scratches” or whatever they were called cannot be described as impressionistic, and Michael’s strong sexual attraction towards Jack’s father is mildly disgusting and wholly pointless.

The ending might be this novel’s saving grace, even though not even that had me completely convinced.

There are some revelations of things that had already been hinted at, there is death (come on, you expected that, didn’t you?), there is the final proof that Michael is not only an asshole, but a mentally ill one too, in the form of disconnected narration (I honestly hope that was intentional. I’M JOKING. Sarcasm is hard to pick out in written form) and there is what I think was supposed to be a mildly relieving, abundantly disquieting and absolutely electrifying ending.

But by then, I didn’t give a fuck anymore.

Nina rates it – 1.5 stars

BUY LINKS: Amber Allure :: Amazon :: All Romance eBooks

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Nina is one of the official reviewers on The Blog of Sid Love.

To read all her reviews, click the link: NINA’S REVIEWS
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