Reviewed by Annika
TITLE: Night Drop
SERIES: Pinx Video Mysteries #1
AUTHOR: Marshall Thornton
NARRATOR: Jack Meloche
PUBLISHER: Self-Published
LENGTH: 5 hours, 1 minute
RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2020
BLURB:
It’s 1992 and Los Angeles is burning.
Noah Valentine, the owner of Pinx Video in Silver Lake, notices the fires have taken their toll on fellow shopkeeper Guy Peterson’s camera shop. After the riots end, he decides to stop by Guy’s to pick up his overdue videos, only to find Guy’s family dividing up his belongings. He died in the camera store fire, or did he?
Noah and his charmingly meddlesome downstairs neighbors begin to suspect something else might have happened to Guy Peterson. Something truly sinister.
The first in a new series from Lambda Award-winner Marshall Thornton, Night Drop strikes a lighter tone than the Boystown Mysteries, while bringing Silver Lake of the early 1990s to life.
REVIEW:
I read Night Drop three years ago when it was first released. I think it was my first experience with gay fiction and went into it expecting mm romance. Back then I didn’t realise there was a difference, and wasn’t quite sold on it to tell you the truth. That’s the thing with expectations. Now though, I’m addicted to this series, I love gay fiction – and the hurt they tend to inflict on the reader/listener. I can’t say that I’ve read – or listened to – many I don’t think my poor heart could take it. But whenever I do pick up a gay fiction book, I know it’s going to be a treat.
For a few years now I’ve been hoping this book would be released into audio, and it seems I got my wish, and I couldn’t be happier – well, maybe if I had the other books loading on my phone, but that’s just me being greedy. Anyway, this series follows Noah Valentine in the early 90’s. In fact we first meet him during the tail end of the riots in 92. For the most part he leads a quiet life, managing his video store and hanging out with friends during evenings. It’s exactly what he needs. Until he just happens to stumble right into a murder mystery. A mystery he and his friends are determined to solve. Because why not?
I love the quiet pace of this series. I know when I first read it, I felt like it was slow-going. But that’s what makes it so great, it was a slower way of life, answers weren’t instant, there were no cell-phones, and address books and rewinding a movie after watching it was a thing. I loved the gossip time with Noah’s friends, they were quirky and a lot of fun and I think they kept the book from becoming too heavy.
Listening to this book now was a bit eerie – and a whole lot of scary. Eerie because what happened back then is happening right now, scary because in the last 30 years we haven’t come further in terms of racism and homophobia. This book is realistic in a way that few books are, well disregarding the whole amateur sleuth thing because that’s pure fun. But the rest of it is very real, and Thornton has a way with words that takes you back in time, experiencing it for yourself. So if you are looking for an escape from reality, this is not it. However it is a masterfully created work that deals with many difficult subjects. It touches you when you least expect it, it surprises you and makes you fall just a little bit in love.
This is my first experience with narrator Jack Meloche and while he might not be up there with my favourites he did a nice job narrating it, and I enjoyed listening to him. He had some minor differences in voices, but nothing too distinct or individual for the characters often melding together. But honestly it never bothered me much, I was too enraptured by the story unfolding and having a look around LA in ’92 to focus on the narration.
If you for some reason have missed this series, this is the time to remedy that. It’s just too good to miss out on.
RATING: 
Story: 5 hearts
Narration: 3.5 hearts
BUY LINKS:
[…] Review […]