Death of a Pirate King (edition 2008)

I did not expect the climatic events that both resolved the mystery and drastically impacted Adrien's life, but once again Lanyon has me finishing one book and already desperate to pick up the next. It was not a cliffhanger so much as a game changer, and I can't wait for the next opportunity to read along with Adrien's life. ( )

A warning, upfront: this review contains a short quotation from the book, from a sex scene.

I care so much about Adrien and Jake that, at this point, the mystery could fly right out of the window, for all I care. That there still is a mystery, and that it's used well to bring the characters together and apart, impresses me. The fact that Adrien's heart condition is treated consistently is great, too.

The emotional development in this book definitely eclipsed the mystery for me, though. I loved seeing Jake a bit wiser, and got to like him again, and the tension between him and Adrien was very well played.

The relationships between Adrien and his family are also great. They don't have centre-stage, a lot of the time, but they're there. He feels like a real person, in some respects, because he has a family and a pet cat he doesn't want, and he has ex-lovers and we don't just see him in the context of Jake.

The thing that strikes me most as a drawback of Josh Lanyon's writing is that he occasionally uses lines/descriptions that utterly break the tension by making me shout with laughter. The one in this book:

And for a strangely polite moment our dicks bowed and scraped to each other in formal greeting -- like the first act of The Mikado or something, and then his cock kissed me hello, and mine nuzzled him back.

I just -- I spit out whatever I was drinking at the time, laughing at that line. The rest was great, but that one line... ( )

Two years have passed since the end of book three, The Hell You Say. Two years without Riordan, two years without being implicated in a new homicide.

The book starts with a suspicious death. Adrien's first book has been optioned for a movie and he's at an intimate Hollywood-type shindig, chatting up the people poised to kick the project into gear, when the guy sitting next to him keels over. Turns out Adrien is a suspect and, yep, Riordan is on the case.

The mystery in this book was the easiest for me to solve of the whole series, mostly because the book is driven by Adrien & Riordan's relationship. With mysteries, the reader can always cheat using the process of elimination: around one-third of the way through the book, make a list of all the characters you've met and start crossing them off. Eventually, you know who the killer is.

With Death of a Pirate King, once you've figured out that Adrien and Riordan are going to reunite there's only one real option. Because for Riordan to redeem himself, he's gonna have to pay his pound of flesh. So the villain wasn't hard to pick - he was the only, the necessary choice.

It was both satisfying and painful to see how much Riordan has to sacrifice in order to put himself right. I hated Riordan for being selfish, for hurting Adrien (and all the other people in his life), and I wanted to see him suffer. But I also hated the cops, the world, for putting him in a position where he has to choose between his career and his sexual identity.

There are so many fantasies we have about people who can be fixed. That if you make just the right adjustment, an asshole can turn into a great guy. I imagine most of the time that they don't. In any case, Lanyon does a good job of presenting both sides of the story - showing how Riordan has been pushed into a corner, but also how many bad decisions he's made in order to stay there.

( )

The fourth book in the series and the thing that annoys me about the series is still there. Why do gay men have to have such complicated relationships? Why is it do hard to just be honest?

I found this an interesting read and the fact there was such a long lapse between the setting of this and the previous book so well suited to the series and events. The ending of this book could lead to a brighter future which would be nice to see.

Worth reading. ( )

Mystery writer and amateur sleuth has finally started to see the fruits of his labors: his first novel has been optioned by Paul Kane, one of the great Hollywood movie producers. But while at a dinner party with many of the people involved with bringing his novel to the big screen, a man named Porter Jones suddenly keels over dead into his bowl of soup. As Adrien was the last person to speak with Jones and also handed Jones the fatal glass of alcohol, he is the prime suspect. Something to which he is not unaccustomed as these types of deaths follow him around like a mischievous shadow. To make matters even more uncomfortable, Adrien's former lover detective Jake Riordan has been assigned to the case.

Once the police leave, Paul Kane approaches Adrien and asks him to do a little covert questioning to find out what happened. He knows of Adrien's reputation as an amateur sleuth and believes that he would be able to get better answers than the police would. Against his better judgement -- and a warning from Jake -- Adrien grudgingly agrees, hoping to find out the truth before he finds himself behind bars. When he begins digging into the case, he uncovers long-held grudges and love affairs gone wrong, and that he and Jake are being manipulated like chess pieces. But will he be able to uncover the truth before he winds up as the next victim?

Josh Lanyon's "Death of a Pirate King" is the fourth title in his great series of mysteries featuring Adrien English. Adrien is smart, funny, and what I like most, is a struggling writer. He has his problems, like the broken relationship with Jake and his own heart condition, and that makes him even more likeable. He seems more like a next door neighbor rather than a hard-boiled gumshoe. The story is nicely paced, deftly combining Adrien's sleuthing with trying to reconcile his romantic past. And it has a sense of humor and sarcastic wit about it without being campy.

It's a great addition to the Adrien English series, and I highly recommend both this book and the series. ( )