James Lear

This murder mystery set in 1920s England is compared in the novel's back copy to Agatha Christie (a little tongue-in-cheeky maybe), but it felt to me like a better ancestral comparison would be P.G. Wodehouse. Or maybe it's Christie plus Wodehouse plus a whole heap of queer sex on the page--perhaps that's the best description. However we're gonna call it, it was a delight of a romp, with a rash of shenanigans and just enough detecting in between the sexing to keep the plot rolling. This show more isn't a romance (the mystery gets solved but there's no love-story HEA), but it might appeal to readers of mystery-romance. I loved it, but do note that if sex on the page is not your bag, this is probably not for you. Oh, and yes, the title is a pun and it's exactly the pun you think it is. If that doesn't amuse you, also maybe this isn't the read for you. show less

This book is bad. So bad, so incredibly bad. The only good things I can say about it are that the spelling and grammar is decently edited and that condoms are conscientiously used throughout the novel. That's it.

My biggest issue is that I find Dan Stagg, our protagonist and narrator, a thoroughly unlikable character. I nearly gave this book a Did Not Finish rating forty pages in because I found being in his head that repulsive. There's casual suicide ideation throughout the entire book, some show more of which I think we are supposed to read as Dan being mildly suicidal and some of which I think is supposed to be read as just an emotional reaction to circumstances and not Dan being suicidal. Dan also has severely violent fantasies, including wishing he could lock the doors of a club shut and set fire to it so he could kill the 200+ people inside the club. All of that is unpleasant (to put it mildly), but the worst culprit of why I don't want to be in Dan's head is his violent sexual fantasies and all the rape.

Yeah, our protagonist starts out this novel starts out by going on about how he wants to put an unnamed side character who's trying to fight him on his knees and shove his crotch in said unnamed character's face. Our protagonist then picks someone up at a bar and when his hook-up says "don't hurt me" Dan's thought is "Bit late for that, [...] you're the one who picked up the ex-marine in a bar." And then we progress later in the book to straight-up rape. "Maybe he'd been waiting for an opportunity like this, when it wouldn't be his choice, his fault. Maybe he'd been antagonizing queers in gas station restrooms for months, hoping to find someone who'd turn the tables," is not how a consensual sexual encounter goes--it's a justification for rape.

So yeah, there's a lot of sex in this book, but a lot of it I'd classify as rape. Which, okay, rape fantasies are a thing and that's fine but the back cover copy is not clear that the sexual encounters the book is filled with and the violence the book is filled with overlap a number of times over the course of the novel. I expected the sexual encounters to overlap with the romance and sweat I was promised and the violence to overlap with the conspiracy, not the other way around.

Oh, and one last point I want to make: the sex is some of the least sexy sex I have ever read. I was at no point even mildly titillated by what I was reading. Perhaps it's me being a heterosexual woman instead of a gay man, but "I felt like I had a vacuum cleaner inside me, and someone had just switched it to max" does not do anything for me even a little. And all of the sexual encounters were like that, a total turn off where I wondered who in the world could ever find what was happening sexy.

So to sum up: I found the protagonist to be repugnant, made worse by the fact that he was the narrator and I got to see far more of his thoughts than I wanted to. The sex is bad, to the point that I hesitate to call this erotica although I'm not sure what else I'd classify it as. And a lot of the sex is just plain rape, which I was not expecting and did not want. show less

A hot romp with Edward MITCH Mitchell who never lets a murder stop him from a quickie. When Reg Walworth is found dead in a closet, Mitch hops on the trail to find the killer screwing any man that steps in front of him. A funny tale set in 1920 England.

Two words for this book: pornographic piffle. It seemed the ideal thing to read while recovering from the mental shock of my viva (which I PASSED) and finding [b:The Insurgent Barricade|9045910|The Insurgent Barricade|Mark Traugott|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348516328s/9045910.jpg|13923785] rather underwhelming. The plot of ‘The Back Passage’, such as it is, concerns the libidinous Bostonian Mitch, who is invited to a country house by a Cambridge friend who he is trying to show more seduce. His initial attempt, which happens on the second page of the book so this doesn’t count as a spoiler, is interrupted by the discovery of a corpse. As Mitch has a yen for detective stories, he decides that he will fuck as many men as it takes to solve the mystery. This approach proves surprisingly effective. The innuendo-laden dialogue is hilarious and Mitch is an appealing narrator, which elevates this above a string of sex scenes. Just about. Not worth reading for the murder mystery, but very entertaining nonetheless. show less