Reviewed by Jenn B.
TITLE: The One That Got Away: An MM Romantic Suspense
AUTHOR: Nicky James
PUBLISHER: Self Published
LENGTH: 337 Pages
RELEASE DATE: March 22, 2021
BLURB:
Someone is following me. I’m not imagining it. I’m not crazy.
Charlie Falkingham is convinced someone is stalking him. There are signs. There are clues. But no one believes him. After living through a childhood horror, Charlie suffers from a severe paranoia disorder, among many things, and the Hamilton Police Department has labeled him the boy who cries wolf.
When the only person in the department who ever listened to Charlie’s concerns retires, who can Charlie reach out to for help?
Arrogant and young, Officer Takoda Dyani has a chip on his shoulder a mile wide. He’s rude and brash and doesn’t play well with others. He has more enemies than friends. When his senior officer assigns him to be Charlie’s consultant, Takoda knows it will end badly. He doesn’t have time to coddle a prissy rich boy.
However, if he can’t calm Charlie’s paranoid delusions and act civil for once, he’ll lose his job.
But are they delusions?
The longer he knows Charlie, the more Takoda realizes, something isn’t right.
Is someone really stalking Charlie, or is Takoda getting too wrapped up in Charlie’s world?
**The One That Got Away is an MM romantic suspense thriller. Triggers for severe anxiety and panic disorder, OCD, dissociative episodes, PTSD. The plot line includes a reference to a past child kidnapping and sex-trafficking incident. Details of sex-trafficking are NOT discussed in any part of the story.**
REVIEW: count on Nicky James to give us another set of damaged and flawed characters wrapped up in another interesting suspenseful story.
Charlie has many issues all stemming from his past childhood trauma when he was kidnapped by a child trafficking ring and held for weeks when he was 12 or so. Now, he is in his later 20s, a successful fantasy author, but a man with many phobias and anxiety issues.
Takoda is a cop with a major chip on his shoulder. He has issues from his past as well, and honestly, I was really turned off by him for the first quarter or so of this story. He is assigned Charlie as a somewhat punishment, but it doesn’t take long before we see that Takoda’s Captain’s plans of this giving him an excuse to can Takoda once and for all will backfire spectacularly.
Turns out that after following orders initially, Takoda realizes there is more going on with Charlie than everyone thinks. He is one of the only people who is able to get through to Charlie, and they just seem to click.
However, there were a few aspects of this story that felt overdone or not expanded on enough. Some things triggered Charlie, while other, bigger things, he got over quickly, for example.
I’m a sucker for people with issues overcoming and finding peace, and Nicky James has been consistently creating them for me. I loved getting to know these two and learning some of their story, and while this wasn’t my favorite, I highly recommend anything from Nicky James’ library. As always, I’m already looking forward to whatever is coming next.
RATING:
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