Reviewed by Dan

TITLE:    The Couple Next Door

AUTHOR:     Rick R. Reed

PUBLISHER:  Dreamspinner Press

LENGTH:     206 Pages

BLURB:

With the couple next door, nothing is as it seems.

Jeremy Booth leads a simple life, scraping by in the gay neighborhood of Seattle, never letting his lack of material things get him down. But the one thing he really wants—someone to love—seems elusive. Until the couple next door moves in and Jeremy sees the man of his dreams, Shane McCallister, pushed down the stairs by a brute named Cole.

Jeremy would never go after another man’s boyfriend, so he reaches out to Shane in friendship while suppressing his feelings of attraction. But the feeling of something being off only begins with Cole being a hard-fisted bully—it ends with him seeming to be different people at different times. Some days, Cole is the mild-mannered John and then, one night in a bar, he’s the sassy and vivacious drag queen Vera.

So how can Jeremy rescue the man of his dreams from a situation that seems to get crazier and more dangerous by the day? By getting close to the couple next door, Jeremy not only puts a potential love in jeopardy, but eventually his very life.

REVIEW:

This book was totally unexpected. I’m not sure what I expected, but this wasn’t it. When one of our other reviewers at Love Bytes asked if I could take over this book for her because she was having a hard time with the story, I was a little skeptical because I’ve read and loved other books by Mr. Reed.

Well now I kind of get what she was saying. This book is pretty bizarre. It really kind of kept me on edge with the storyline premise and execution.  Little snippets of information are released throughout which build to the big finish, and honestly I couldn’t put the book down.

We meet Jeremy Booth just as he is getting home from yet another failed date with a guy he met on the internet. All his dates seem to fail. Everything about Jeremy’s life seems to be a fail. He moved to Seattle chasing a guy, who it turned out was married…awkward…and then stayed to write his Great American Novel. Well, that is done, and he has the pile of rejection slips to show for it.  Meanwhile…he is cleaning houses to support himself.

This night though, things are about to change. As Jeremy walks in the front door of the apartment building he witnesses a man being hurled down the stairs by another man. The hurled man, who it turns out is named Shane, has just moved into the apartment next door to Jeremy with the other man, who is named John…or it might be Cole…

There starts the mystery of The Couple Next Door. There is much more than meets the eye when it comes to Shane.  Shane’s stories don’t add up.  Something is up that Jeremy needs to know about.  Then Jeremy finds out that John and Cole are two personalities within the same person and that they are shared by a third personality Vera. It turns out that John has multiple personalities, all very different from the others.  But why is Shane staying with John/Cole/Vera after the awful things they do to him in their multiple personalities?

I spent the entire book guessing what was going on, and it turned out I was pretty close with my final thoughts, once I got to the big reveal scene. There were a few times during the book, particularly near the end, when I was swearing at Jeremy and questioning his intellect, but I’m not doing any spoilers and telling you why.

I’m just going to say that I liked this book a lot, and I’m going to recommend it to a certain audience. If you’re looking for a book that has a twisting plot, and an underlying mystery, then this book would be a good fit for you. If you’re looking for a big romance novel with lots of rainbows and lots of sex, then this one isn’t for you.

RATING:

BUY LINKS: 

Dreamspinner Press

Amazon

ARe