Reviewed by Larissa
TITLE: Scapegoat
SERIES: Working Dogs, Book One
AUTHOR: J.R. Gray
PUBLISHER: Self-published
LENGTH: 250 pages
RELEASE DATE: February 9, 2022
BLURB:
Special Agent Nolan Hudson
At seventeen, I ran. I joined the military and planned to never step foot in my home town again. Nothing could make me return to that hellhole and the pain I buried there, or so I thought— until I found myself on a plane to that very place.
Almost two decades later, I’m forced home to help find a missing nine year old. As a member of the most elite K9 special unit in the country, it was my job and you can’t exactly say no to the FBI. It should be easy, and I won’t have to face what I ran from.
However, the case is anything but simple and to make matters worse, I’m faced with the last person I ever wanted to see again: Officer Callum Stone— the sheriff’s son and the town’s golden boy. Only he’s not anymore—he’s a ruin of what he once was.
It’s Callum’s kid who’s missing, and all the feelings I’d spent almost twenty years running from rise to the surface.
As secrets come to light, we realize our small town is hiding a lot more than we thought, and we’ll have to follow the trail of deception to get justice and maybe a second chance at love.
Scapegoat is a second chance MM romantic suspense, featuring a small town, some FBI K9 fun, and hurt/comfort vibes. It is the first book in J.R. Gray’s Working Dogs series, which will be packed with action, suspense, and humor.
REVIEW:
J.R. Gray’s Scapegoat, the first book in his new Working Dogs series about a group of men in the FBI’s elite K9 special unit, drove me to an internal, philosophical debate about likable stories featuring unlikable characters. Here, we meet Special Agent Nolan Hudson, an honorable, dedicated, generous man who is part of one of the country’s top K9 search and rescue teams. Nolan fled his small hometown in Wisconsin when his secret high school best friend/boyfriend, Callum Stone, broke his heart. Now, Nolan’s been called back to his small, toxic hometown to help investigate the disappearance of Callum’s nine-year-old daughter and her mother, Callum’s ex-girlfriend.
Callum drove Nolan away seventeen years ago, but he never stopped loving Nolan, nor did Nolan stop loving Callum. Instead, these two have lived lonely lives in heartbreak like shells of themselves. Nolan vows he’ll keep his distance from Callum because he doesn’t think he can survive losing him a second time. Yet his resolve disintegrates quickly (too quickly in my opinion) upon seeing Callum devastated and suffering.
Mr. Gray develops Nolan and Callum’s characters with a good level of depth and complexity. I liked Nolan, but cannot say the same about Callum. While I was sympathetic towards his plight, Callum irritated me with his selfishness. His behavior is perhaps explainable given Callum’s past trauma at the hands of his horrible, controlling, abusive father, who happens to be the town’s Sheriff and Callum’s boss. However, Callum’s struggle to reconcile his feelings toward Nolan against his belief that he’s trapped in his hometown under the thumb of his father, causes him to use Nolan once again.
This prompted me to consider whether I would have liked the book better with an MC more endearing than Callum. My knee-jerk response was yes, but then I considered that a character other than Callum would have anchored a very different story than what played out. Callum doesn’t fall in the “characters we love to hate” category. Instead, he’s a frustratingly difficult character to root for when juxtaposed with the endearing Nolan.
Notwithstanding, Scapegoat is an enjoyable story that holds your interest. No doubt, Nolan and Callum have chemistry and an emotional connection, although I found the suspense mystery/storyline more interesting at times than the romantic storyline. Mr. Gray balances humor, heat, and horror (dark topics are addressed), which is not an easy trifecta to pull off. He makes it work, for the most part. But some aspects of the story felt off? Random? Not sure what the right word is to describe it, but certain events struck me as odd; I felt like I missed something even though I hadn’t because some plot twist was either vague or came out of the blue. Also, some of the humor and conversations were out of place in context, making me wonder why the characters would be talking about that right then.
On the whole, Scapegoat is enjoyable even though it didn’t entirely capitalize on the promise generated by the prequel story, Sitting Ducks, available through the YBBB giveaway. (That short is not required reading before Scapegoat, although it is enjoyable in its own right so it doesn’t hurt to read it first.) However, there’s enough that works in Scapegoat to bring me back for book two.
RATING: 
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