Rainbow Reviews

BOOK BLURB:
Visions of blood and death haunt Richie England. A new serial killer is stalking the city, and Richie finds himself in the middle of a frightening psychological battle with the killer and the spectres behind the evil.

As the detective in charge of the Vivisectionist case, the last thing Julian Anders needs is a damn psychic telling him about visions. When another body is found, Julian is forced to accept Richie's help. The killer has seen Richie, and with his life at stake, both Julian and Richie need to find the answers and the killer before it's too late.

BOOK REVIEW:
2050 is the latest release by Mychael Black and Shayne Carmichael. It’s billed as a novel, but it’s really a novel, a short story, and teaser for the next book, all linked by common characters and background. Set in the year 2050, it’s the story of how Detective Julian Anders and psychic Richie England meet, fall in love, beat a bad guy, get married and fuck. Rather a lot, actually, occasionally with handcuffs.

The first 130 pages or so is the main story. Driven by an insane need to create works of art involving soon-to-be-dead and freshly dead people, The Vivisectionist has been terrorizing the city for the past two years. Every other month he picks a victim from the unsuspecting populace, kills him or her in aesthetically nasty ways, then feeds their souls to a shadowy creature lurking at the edges of the story.

Richie has a vision of one of the murders, and that’s where the main story starts. Being the good citizen he is, Richie reports what he’s seen. Julian’s not buying it as he thinks psychics are either frauds or lunatics. Sexual attraction trumps disbelief, and soon Julian sees the truth behind Richie’s visions. (Or at least the beauty of his behind, and in beauty there’s truth. Something like that.)

Unfortunately Richie stumbles across The Vivisectionist and the odd shadow spirits that follow him as the serial killer sets up his latest victim for display. Like a sensible person he runs, and Julian, himself sensible, puts Richie in protective custody in Julian’s apartment. The Vivisectionist, Richie, and Julian begin the inexorable spiral to their inevitable final confrontation.

After the novel ends, the short story starts, thirty pages of Julian and Ritchie’s wedding and cop fetish. It’s fluffy and alternates between being enthusiastic porn and a nice little slice-of-live piece. Mychael and Shane nail the cop fetish when Julian nails Richie. It’s deeply shallow and arousing and fun.

The final dozen pages of 2050 are a teaser for the unnamed sequel. HAG, an anti-gay hate group from the city’s past is starting to stir. Long before Julian joined the police, they terrorized the city’s gay community with a series of vicious bombings. The group was finally rounded up and its members thrown in jail. Unfortunately some of the jail terms are up and starting trouble, apparently with military-grade high-explosives. Making matters worse, Julian starts to develop skills that Richie understands all to well just as the teaser ends.

As you can probably tell, this book’s a bit of a mixed bag. It’s set in the near future, where life’s not much different then it is now, and that part really does work nicely. The psychic powers Richie manifests mostly work as well; they’re subtle and not that easily testable, the sort of thing that could plausibly mix with high-tech, slipping in without being generally acknowledged and exploited. The battle with the evil entity at the end is the sole exception, where both the bad guy and one of Richie’s friends start tossing fireballs around. Presumably some psychic researcher somewhere would’ve noticed that.

What works less well is the actual climax to the novel. Less a climax, really, than an anti-climax. Having the main story end two thirds of the way through the book was disconcerting; I was expecting the plot to continue, especially given how anti-climactic the climax was, but the villain backing the plot just fell over.

The other problem the main novel has is the speed at which Julian and Richie fall for each other. The initial introduction of the two to each other is filled with distrust and tension until it all just vanishes and they’re diving for each other’s tonsils. That sort of instant-love cliché works okay in books where the romance is the main driving force behind the story, but much less well in books where there’s a plot outside the romance. Having said that, the two of them do fuck pleasantly, and with some enthusiasm.

The short story following the novel, chapters seventeen through nineteen, was nice enough, though it would’ve been better if it had been clearly marked as a separate piece, rather than just another set of chapters. I kept looking for the nonexistent signs that the original plot was continuing, and that made it less enjoyable than it might have been.

The final teaser was the biggest disappointment, again because it wasn’t marked as a teaser. It was just chapter twenty, and launched into a completely new, unrelated plot before ending abruptly. There’s certainly nothing wrong with that, but it left me scratching my head and wondering how a pair of big plots could get resolved in a dozen pages. They couldn’t, of course, and the book came to a screeching halt with a to be continued and set of ellipsis.

This isn’t a bad collection, but neither is it a great one. It’s a lot better if you go in realizing it’s a long piece, short piece, and teaser rather than a single coherent book. With that in mind, as long as you're good with the plot being thin and the sex frequent and enthusiastic, it's an okay read.

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