Reviewed by Elizabetta

TITLE: Secrets and Ink

AUTHOR: Lou Harper

PUBLISHER: Samhain Publishing

LENGTH: 128 pages

BLURB: When Karma writes you a ticket, pay up or else…

If life was like the movies, Jem Mitchell’s wouldn’t be such a mess. In LA’s glittering world of dreams, he works an unglamorous job at a gourmet grocery store. His past is so deep and dark, the details are lost even to him. All he knows is he was once cursed by a meter maid, and ever since, his love life has sucked.

When Detective Nick Davies becomes a regular at the store, Jem dares to hope he’s un-hexed at last. He should have known that sex with a remarkably normal guy, devoid of weird fetishes and fatal personality flaws, was too good to be true.

During a post-encounter cuddle, Nick recognizes the tattoo on Jem’s back—and remembers him as a young hustler he arrested nine years past.

As Jem’s memories come crashing back, he flees from Nick, but fate contrives to keep pushing them back together. And when Jem’s old partner in crime is found murdered, the stakes are raised for life, for love, and a dangerous drama with no guarantee of a Hollywood ending.

Warning: Stars a mild-mannered store clerk with a shady past, a hunky cop whose passion in the bedroom is as big as his passion for justice, and celebrity sightings you won’t see on TMZ.

REVIEW:

Jem was a bad boy in his teen years. Living in Hollywood, he and his old boyfriend Riley, really tore up the town, they were such bad boys… shoplifting, drugging & drinking, whoring. They did it all just for the hell of it. Call it rebellion, ’cause Jem comes from a supportive, loving family.

Jem really is a good guy though, and he grows out of the rebellious stage and leaves Riley behind. He’s all grown up now but he finds the secrets you keep don’t always stay hidden. Sometimes the past comes back to bite you on the ass.

When Jem meets Nick Davies, an LAPD detective, he has the immediate hots for the square-jawed, quietly self confident cop. But just when things seem to be going well, Nick connects Jem to his past and it’s all downhill from there.

Ho boy, Jem is a pretty hilarious guy. He thinks he’s living under a curse, things haven’t been going right for him. He’s recovering from a horrible accident, his cat ran away, and his new love interest thinks he’s a loser. To add insult to injury, it looks like someone from his past is out to get him too.

I like Jem, and it’s a good thing as the story is in first person from his POV, so you get to know him well. Normally, I don’t consider myself a tense snob. If the writer can get it done, the tense doesn’t matter. But it took me a while to adjust to the delivery here. Jem’s inner dialog is often funny and endearing but at times his dialog with Nick seems stilted. Still, Jem is engaging, and the story picks up when he works with Nick to find out who is out to get him. When Jem discovers that Nick has secrets of his own (boy, that came out of nowhere. And now I want to know more about Nick’s past with that Japanese lover.), things heat up nicely and I like Nick a little more too. There’s more to him than meets the eye, and Nick makes a good foil for Jem’s harebrained tendencies.

So, Jem’s luck may be changing. It’s fitting that the author sets his story in Tinseltown, where secrets are rife and some would do anything to keep them. Jem finds out that keeping them may not bring him the best of luck. The author delivers an entertaining read with two engaging characters.

Elizabetta rates it –  

BUY LINKS: Samhain