Reviewed by Larissa

TITLE: Never Stay Gone

SERIES:  Big Bend Texas Rangers Book 1

AUTHOR: Tal Bauer

PUBLISHER: Self-published

RELEASE DATE:  October 9, 2021

LENGTH: 361 pages

BLURB: 

Six bodies in a single grave… in the same West Texas country where Dakota left everything behind.

Every beat of my heart belongs to you.

Thirteen years ago, Dakota Jennings thought he’d found his forever when he fell in love with Shane Carson. But one afternoon shattered their love story, and both Dakota and Shane left Rustler, Texas, with broken hearts. Even now, Dakota is still feeling the agony of losing Shane. Sure, he’s a Texas Ranger, but that’s not how he wanted to live his life. All he ever wanted was to love Shane.

Loving you is the only time I feel alive.

Shane’s life was supposed to be different than this. There’d been a plan, ever since he was knee-high to his father. But falling for Dakota spun Shane’s world upside down, and for years, Shane has had nothing but the memories of all that he lost: Dakota’s gentle touch, and the sweetness of his lips, and the star-strewn nights they spent wrapped in each other’s arms.

West of the Pecos, there is no law.

When the Rangers get the call about six bodies being pulled out of a mass grave in West Texas, the governor sends Dakota to run the investigation. Dakota heads back to his hometown and comes face-to-face with the last man he ever expected to see again: only now, he’s Deputy Shane Carson… Dakota’s local partner assigned to the case.

There’s nothing Dakota wants more than a second chance with Shane, but so much is stacked against them: six corpses, a murderer on the loose, and history that refuses to stay buried. And the bodies keep piling up as Dakota and Shane try to run the killer down across the West Texas plains.

In a moment, everything changes: the hunters become the hunted, the past fractures, and all Dakota thought he knew comes tumbling down. Secrets break wide open as Dakota remembers–

This is West Texas, and out here, nothing is as it seems.

Big Bend County is a place of beauty and desolation, of secrets and small towns. Where the past and the present collide, and where nothing stays hidden forever.

This MM romantic suspense is the first in the new Big Bend Texas Rangers series. Come along for the West Texas sunsets, the heart-pounding thrills, and the hard-won Happy Ever Afters.

REVIEW: 

Tal Bauer is not one to cater to delicate sensibilities, shocking, devastating, and emotionally overwhelming his readers without compunction.  In his latest romantic suspense novel, Never Stay Gone, he stays true to form in that regard, opening the narrative with Deputy Sheriff Shane Carson’s gruesome discovery of six corpses in a mass grave.  Shane stands sentinel over the mass grave in the endless darkness of the Big Bend County, West Texas desert night, waiting for the forensics and investigative teams to arrive to process the crime scene. The first to arrive is Shane’s boss, Sheriff Heath Reed, with the investigative lead in tow.  Already reeling from one grim discovery, Shane’s world tilts off its axis when he meets the investigator and finds himself, for the first time in thirteen years, looking into the eyes of the long-lost love of his life, Texas Ranger Dakota Jennings. 

Like he’s unwinding spools of thread, Mr. Bauer spins out a gripping romantic suspense tale, weaving together complex storylines all stemming from darkness and desolation both within and without.  The pervasive darkness and desolation give cover to the savage actions of a soulless murderer in the bleak expanse of the West Texas landscape.  But they also allow misplaced failures to deplete the light and heart of a good man and to drive another man to wild deeds, a bitter temperament, and a hostile attitude toward love.  

Mr. Bauer pulls no punches here.  He warned us from the beginning: 

“Emptiness as deep and wide as a man’s lonely soul spread across the Big Bend.  Not a lot of life to break up all that desolation.”

But should we have known that Mr. Bauer meant that desolation and darkness could destroy souls of the living as well as the lives of those six women left to rot in the ground? He certainly crafted the story so we wouldn’t know and shouldn’t expect it, even though he told us so from the beginning.  Such delicious deceit.  Such careful creative cleverness.  Even my saying this here doesn’t tell you what happens in his intricately plotted story. 

Never Stay Gone is as much a mystery/thriller as it is a romance, a tricky blend to get right.  But Mr. Bauer does it expertly, with Shane and Dakota’s second chance love story mirroring the macabre serial murder whodunit.  While they piece together the puzzle of their separation and the likelihood of a HEA, they also work to piece together the motivations and identity of a sick killer. The parallels are striking and devastatingly effective, gripping us in the clutches of Mr. Bauer’s masterful saga of poor choices with long-lasting repercussions. 

You’ll find everything we expect and appreciate from Mr. Bauer on display in Never Stay Gone.  Shane and Dakota prove to be breathtakingly complicated and overwhelmingly beautiful together.  Mr. Bauer conveys all of the love, trepidation, desperation, and unadulterated carnal need between these two men in the scenes when they finally come together … and combust.  This is scorching sex exquisitely written, and it leaves behind an irrevocably changed Shane and Dakota, like the result of the chemical reaction caused by burning up in flame. 

Never Stay Gone lives up to its title in my library, where it stands at the ready for a reread.  Mr. Bauer does everything right in this riveting story.  Whether you’ve read and love Mr. Bauer’s work or have never read him before, you will want to read Never Stay Gone.  

This is some of Mr. Bauer’s best work right here, folks.  Don’t miss out.  I can’t wait to see what’s next in this addictive Big Bend Texas Rangers series.  Whatever it is, I’m there for it, and I know it will be fantastic.

RATING:

BUY LINK: 

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