REVIEWED BY CINDY
TITLE: You Can’t Go Home Again 
AUTHOR: Michael Murphy
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 196 Pages
Blurb:
In work and in love, life has taught seasoned police officer Jack that closeness only leads to pain. But Jack is wracked with guilt when his rookie partner Kevin is shot during an undercover assignment and dies in his arms. Why didn’t he take the time to get to know the rookie a little?
At the funeral, Jack takes a liking to Kevin’s brother, Devin. But Jack knows making a connection can cause more hurt, and living on opposite coasts is an added obstacle.
With his brother dead, Devin feels a responsibility to Kevin’s pregnant widow, Marie. He packs up and moves east, only to have Marie, outraged that he’s put his life on hold, slam the door in his face. Devin turns to the only other person he knows in town. As much as it goes against his philosophies on life, Jack takes him in without hesitation.
Their tentative exploration into romance is interrupted when Devin is mistaken for his dead brother and taken captive. Just as Jack opens his heart, reality slams into him. But he can’t lose anyone else. More than the need to simply save a captive drives Jack to find Devin and bring him home.
Review:
Jack is a cop who spends way too much time alone. He’s isolated himself because of a bad relationship and when a tragedy hits the young officer he’s partnered with on an undercover mission, he regrets that isolation from Kevin. He makes a point of checking on the man’s family and there he meets his future.
Devin is the dead officer’s twin and sparks fly the first time the two men meet, but it takes some time for them to come to terms with the feelings swirling around in their heads and hearts.
I wanted to love this story, I really did. The premise is excellent and it has all the ingredients needed for a great tale. But for me, it didn’t really live up to the promise it showed.
I liked the characters but had a hard time connecting with them. It felt like everything was being pushed at me too fast with no time for anything to sink in. The whole voice of the story was very mono-tone and I found that the attempts at humor were flat.
I wanted to fall in love with Jack and Devin as they fell in love with each other but that didn’t happen. They were nice guys, kinda sweet, but it lacked passion for me.
And the side characters, which mostly consisted of Marie, Kevin’s widow, and Kevin and Devin’s crazy mother. I get what the author was going for with Marie, the tough-as-nails female cop with the soft heart underneath all the protective snark, but she just mostly came across as bitchy to me. I would have liked to have seen more of her being kind and normal to the two men trying their hardest to support her but once again the author was too concerned about trying to be funny instead of conveying some real emotion.
And really, while I appreciated the attempt to throw some angst into the story with the crazy mother, her story needed to be a little more detailed.
I really do appreciate the effort the author put forth. I loved all the little touches, with Jack and Devin spending time together and with the three of them spending time together trying to learn as much about raising babies as they could. I also loved the easiness the two men had together and it would be nice if that happened a little more often in real-life relationships.
This is a nice story, but the angst just sort of seemed thrown in there with no real direction or reason except to kind of push the storyline a little more forward. I was really hoping for more from this story but mostly I just came away a little disappointed.
Rating: 
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