Reviewed by Dan

TITLE:    Would I Lie To You

AUTHOR:     Brad Vance

PUBLISHER:  Brad Vance

LENGTH:     289 Pages

BLURB:

Software billionaire Marc Julian’s orderly life is shattered one night by a cyber-intrusion into his company’s servers. He’s always surrounded himself with the best people, but finding the culprit behind this might require a real expert…and sometimes it takes a thief to catch a thief.

Jesse Winchester and his team of “grey hat” hackers are suddenly available to Marc. Marc doesn’t know if he should trust Jesse with the keys to his company’s kingdom. After all, Jesse’s a convicted felon, sent to prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. A felon sentenced to thirty-five years in prison, who mysteriously served only three years before being released…

Marc’s first company, his whole life, was shattered because he trusted the wrong person. This time there’s even more at stake, but few other options. Especially when his evil enemies, the billionaire industrialist Krom brothers, are revealed to be the source of the intrusion.

Is Jesse there to help Marc, or does he have his own history with the Kroms, his own score to settle? As Jesse and Marc spend more time together, their growing intimacy is at war with their need to win their respective battles. Soon the game they start to play with each other, against each other, becomes more exciting, more exquisitely frustrating…and more dangerous.

REVIEW:

I just love when I find a new author that I haven’t read before, and they turn out to be this damn good. Brad Vance’s Would I Lie To You is a sharp turn from a lot of the books currently flooding the m/m genre as a whole. I loved the book, and can’t wait until the next one comes out. It mentions at the end of the book that there will be further adventures, and I want them soon!

Mark Julian is a billionaire, several times over. He is also hyper-intelligent, bi-polar, and gay. His first company went out of business when his friend, co-owner, and sex-interest, took off in the middle of the night one night with all the company’s money. Mark has always felt bad about the 35 people who worked for them that lost their jobs over something he should have seen coming.

Now Mark has built another company, which develops leading edge software. The company has a problem though, someone has hacked into their un-hackable system. They need an expert.

Enter Jesse Winchester, who because of my inner geekdom somehow in my mind instantly became Sam and Dean’s younger brother. Just kidding, they aren’t related, so no angels, demons or other supernatural entities in this book. And can I just mention while I’m going there how refreshing that is?

Jesse and his team are a group of four crack computer hacking experts from various backgrounds, not all of them completely on the right side of the law shall we say. But they are incredible at following back computer hacks to their source and at hacking themselves. Unfortunately, when they follow the current hack back it leads to the very evil Krom brothers, who both Mark and Jesse have had prior run-ins with. It turns out they now have Mark’s company’s new traffic control software, which will revolutionize traffic signal control.

I’m almost ecstatic over this book. I loved the mainstream type story, that while having m/m MCs and having a fair amount of m/m sex, still reads like something you would find on a “top sellers” list somewhere outside the m/m genre. The book was very well written, had no editing issues that I saw, and a very believable story. I could picture another set of billionaire brothers whose last name starts with K, being involved in these same nefarious activities. And Big Brother watching you? He is watching me type this line and looking at me out of that computer camera in front of me….who are we kidding?  No, I’m not really paranoid!  Much….

I highly recommend this book, and can’t wait for the next installment. If you like books with corporate espionage, high tech themes, money hungry billionaires, double-crossing storylines, and a little BDSM thrown in, then this book will be perfect for you!

RATING:

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