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explorebooks's review against another edition
dark
emotional
funny
mysterious
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
layla87's review against another edition
I have reached the conviction that Gregory Ashe is probably not for me.
*gets blocked by several GR friends*
I've been making myself read his series because I feel like I SHOULD like them...but I don't.
You know how sometimes you mesh with an author and you like all of their work when other readers don't like them at all... or the opposite?
I think this is what GA is for me. I just don't mesh with his style of story telling, as great as it is.
You see I can absolutely say that he's an amazing writer, with great plots and plot and character development. He has immense skill in weaving a story overall.
But..
But..... the lack of romance in his books is what's turning me of.
I know that they get together eventually, and I know that they reach the point where they love each other and all that jazz... but the road to get there is, for me, too long.
That and the fact that one MC in his books always seems to be loving/having sex with another person other than the second MC.
My monogamous and romantic heart kind of hates that.
So... I'm throwing in the towel for now.
No rating because these are my OWN hang-ups and absolutely DO NOT reflect the author's skills.
*gets blocked by several GR friends*
I've been making myself read his series because I feel like I SHOULD like them...but I don't.
You know how sometimes you mesh with an author and you like all of their work when other readers don't like them at all... or the opposite?
I think this is what GA is for me. I just don't mesh with his style of story telling, as great as it is.
You see I can absolutely say that he's an amazing writer, with great plots and plot and character development. He has immense skill in weaving a story overall.
But..
But..... the lack of romance in his books is what's turning me of.
I know that they get together eventually, and I know that they reach the point where they love each other and all that jazz... but the road to get there is, for me, too long.
That and the fact that one MC in his books always seems to be loving/having sex with another person other than the second MC.
My monogamous and romantic heart kind of hates that.
So... I'm throwing in the towel for now.
No rating because these are my OWN hang-ups and absolutely DO NOT reflect the author's skills.
bookish_notes's review against another edition
1.0
Look. This book is just way too long for the first book in a series. I do not concentrate well when it comes to long books and characters we don’t know. I need books to build me up to it. I had the same problem with Pretty Pretty Boys too, the first book in the Hazard and Somerset series, and I eventually liked it. The first 2 times I tried to read Pretty Pretty Boys, I put it on my DNF shelf. And that’s exactly how I felt here and with no audiobook to listen to instead.
So, yeah, I maybe should’ve waited for an audiobook first, because this book was just NOT doing it for me. I love Gregory Ashe’s books, but this was too dense of a read, I think? And depressing for all the wrong reasons.
Trigger warnings for ableism, fatphobia, mental disorder, homomisia, mentions of rape, emotional abuse, gaslighting, mentions of child abuse, racism, jokes about domestic violence, jokes about rape, animal deaths (particularly gruesome death in the next book excerpt), and mentions of a suicide attempt.
That’s not to say I don’t like the characters, because I do. I love Tean and I love Jem. Tean is very intelligent and is a wildlife vet for the Division of Wildlife Resources (also known as DWR). The book is set in Salt Lake City, Utah and a smaller city on the outskirts called Tooele. And fun fact, I lived there for awhile during the summers when I dad worked out of there for a couple of years. So am I interested to see if an audiobook narrator can pronounce the city’s name? Yes.
Jem is everything Tean is not and from a life of hard living that Tean has never known. While Tean grew up in a nice Mormon family, Jem bounced between foster homes and is now in his late twenties and a grifter, but like, the good kind? We witness Jem set up and threatening a pedophile so thoroughly, that the guy will probably never do anything again. And Jem will be able to blackmail the guy into owing money to Jem for a long time. If you’ve read the latest Hazard and Somerset story arc, the Union of Swords, I would say Jem is similar in this regard to Darnell, but with less violence.
This is a mighty slow burn romance. I don’t know how many books there are in this series and I’m not sure it’s been mentioned? But hopefully it’s not too many books. The five books it took for Hazard and Somers to get together is my ultimate limit and I don’t think I can handle it if I have to go through that length of time again. And I LOVE a slow burn, but only so much you know?
The mystery aspect of this book is Jem trying to find his brother, Benny. They met as foster kids and now Jem does everything he can to make sure Benny is looked after. But when Benny disappears, he tries to find answers and runs across the kind and helpful doctor, Tean.
Benny comes off a bit weird to people who meet him, but he’s never entirely wrong about the stuff he reports to Tean. So really, Tean is one of the few, if ONLY, person who takes Benny seriously. People don’t give Benny a chance, so it’s hard to find anyone willing to go to the extra effort to look for him. Jem has his contacts willing to help him out for a favor, but Tean is just a nice guy who knows a lot about the area and what Benny would be looking for, and Jem is drawn to him.
I think this book is depressing in how everything unravels. Usually with a mystery book, the subject of a disappearance or a murder are already gone by the time the book starts. But in this case, we do meet Benny for a little bit and we see Jem’s desperation to find out what happened to Benny and see how all the people they come across dismiss Benny automatically. We find out that Benny is supposed to be on medication and might have schizophrenia. So it’s sad to see all these characters treat Benny the way they do and even sadder to see nobody take Jem’s concerns seriously because of Benny’s mental disorder. The characters (rather, all the suspects) also CONSTANTLY make fun of Benny’s weight and mental disorder so it’s just a lot and maybe unnecessary to bring up so many times throughout the book?
Jem is going THROUGH it in this story. And something I didn’t love is how everything is somehow his fault that he needs to apologize for or he needs to make sure he doesn’t hurt Tean’s feelings. Tean is a bit clueless about how many he should interact with others, but I don’t think it was right that Tean feels like Jem owes him an apology at every turn. Tean needs to apologize too. Jem is worried out of his mind for his brother and when they DO find out what happens, it’s like Jem doesn’t get a chance to breathe and Tean just tries to push him out of his life over something he won’t let Jem explain.
Which leads me to Ammon. Ammon is a policeman and also appears to others as the model Mormon. He’s married and has a kid. But underneath that, he’s stringing Tean along. Tean has been in love with Ammon before he even knew what being gay meant and Ammon is a piece of shit who only cares about himself but wants it all. He’ll never admit he’s not straight and will never leave his wife. He loses his temper with Tean all the time and frankly? It’s an abusive situation with the way Ammon treats Tean and Tean deserves better.
It’s never mentioned outright but I think Tean reads as autistic? So while he does have his quirks that Ammon and even his own parents constantly puts him down about or straight up ignores him when he spews out horrifying animals facts or statistics, at least he has his coworker Hannah and Jem to take him seriously and gets a chance to know him.
I think Ammon needs to pull himself together and go to therapy. His kid too. That seems like a toxic, repressed household and they both need lots of therapy and Ammon’s kid especially needs a lot of love, compassion, and understanding that he probably won’t find within a tightly controlled Mormon household.
This book is just L O N G. It has descriptions that go on for days and I don’t know if it’s because so much of the descriptions involve nature or what, but I was bored out of my mind. The only thing that helped was skimming or outright skipping the longer paragraphs of descriptions so we could get to some talking between characters. We need more scenes with the characters together, I think. Because whatever else was going on wasn’t interesting.
The ending ends on a really weird note? It feels very abrupt. I got to it and I was just like, that’s it??? It was so strange. Yes, the text has a quick excerpt of the next book at the end, so that was something. But the ending to this first book was a bit jarring in how sudden it felt. I didn’t love that.
There’s a lot that still remembers unanswered. Does Jem ever clear out the apartment, do Jem and Tean ever return the keys, does Jem ever get a chance to tell Tean what he was caught blackmailing a guy for, or why’d Tean wait so long about pointing out he noticed another thing Jem was hiding??? I feel like Tean at least should’ve showed some sympathy and groveled about that. I know Jem forgives him but it left a sour taste to me.
So. Yeah. I didn’t particularly like this book and what there was between Jem and Tean could’ve been a lot better. The ableism and fatphobia in this book is a LOT and takes place throughout the book. Some of it is challenged, but not all the time. This wasn’t really all that fun of a read and I just hope the second book is better.
***Thanks to the author for giving me an an arc for review!***
So, yeah, I maybe should’ve waited for an audiobook first, because this book was just NOT doing it for me. I love Gregory Ashe’s books, but this was too dense of a read, I think? And depressing for all the wrong reasons.
Trigger warnings for ableism, fatphobia, mental disorder, homomisia, mentions of rape, emotional abuse, gaslighting, mentions of child abuse, racism, jokes about domestic violence, jokes about rape, animal deaths (particularly gruesome death in the next book excerpt), and mentions of a suicide attempt.
That’s not to say I don’t like the characters, because I do. I love Tean and I love Jem. Tean is very intelligent and is a wildlife vet for the Division of Wildlife Resources (also known as DWR). The book is set in Salt Lake City, Utah and a smaller city on the outskirts called Tooele. And fun fact, I lived there for awhile during the summers when I dad worked out of there for a couple of years. So am I interested to see if an audiobook narrator can pronounce the city’s name? Yes.
Jem is everything Tean is not and from a life of hard living that Tean has never known. While Tean grew up in a nice Mormon family, Jem bounced between foster homes and is now in his late twenties and a grifter, but like, the good kind? We witness Jem set up and threatening a pedophile so thoroughly, that the guy will probably never do anything again. And Jem will be able to blackmail the guy into owing money to Jem for a long time. If you’ve read the latest Hazard and Somerset story arc, the Union of Swords, I would say Jem is similar in this regard to Darnell, but with less violence.
This is a mighty slow burn romance. I don’t know how many books there are in this series and I’m not sure it’s been mentioned? But hopefully it’s not too many books. The five books it took for Hazard and Somers to get together is my ultimate limit and I don’t think I can handle it if I have to go through that length of time again. And I LOVE a slow burn, but only so much you know?
The mystery aspect of this book is Jem trying to find his brother, Benny. They met as foster kids and now Jem does everything he can to make sure Benny is looked after. But when Benny disappears, he tries to find answers and runs across the kind and helpful doctor, Tean.
Benny comes off a bit weird to people who meet him, but he’s never entirely wrong about the stuff he reports to Tean. So really, Tean is one of the few, if ONLY, person who takes Benny seriously. People don’t give Benny a chance, so it’s hard to find anyone willing to go to the extra effort to look for him. Jem has his contacts willing to help him out for a favor, but Tean is just a nice guy who knows a lot about the area and what Benny would be looking for, and Jem is drawn to him.
I think this book is depressing in how everything unravels. Usually with a mystery book, the subject of a disappearance or a murder are already gone by the time the book starts. But in this case, we do meet Benny for a little bit and we see Jem’s desperation to find out what happened to Benny and see how all the people they come across dismiss Benny automatically. We find out that Benny is supposed to be on medication and might have schizophrenia. So it’s sad to see all these characters treat Benny the way they do and even sadder to see nobody take Jem’s concerns seriously because of Benny’s mental disorder. The characters (rather, all the suspects) also CONSTANTLY make fun of Benny’s weight and mental disorder so it’s just a lot and maybe unnecessary to bring up so many times throughout the book?
Jem is going THROUGH it in this story. And something I didn’t love is how everything is somehow his fault that he needs to apologize for or he needs to make sure he doesn’t hurt Tean’s feelings. Tean is a bit clueless about how many he should interact with others, but I don’t think it was right that Tean feels like Jem owes him an apology at every turn. Tean needs to apologize too. Jem is worried out of his mind for his brother and when they DO find out what happens, it’s like Jem doesn’t get a chance to breathe and Tean just tries to push him out of his life over something he won’t let Jem explain.
Which leads me to Ammon. Ammon is a policeman and also appears to others as the model Mormon. He’s married and has a kid. But underneath that, he’s stringing Tean along. Tean has been in love with Ammon before he even knew what being gay meant and Ammon is a piece of shit who only cares about himself but wants it all. He’ll never admit he’s not straight and will never leave his wife. He loses his temper with Tean all the time and frankly? It’s an abusive situation with the way Ammon treats Tean and Tean deserves better.
It’s never mentioned outright but I think Tean reads as autistic? So while he does have his quirks that Ammon and even his own parents constantly puts him down about or straight up ignores him when he spews out horrifying animals facts or statistics, at least he has his coworker Hannah and Jem to take him seriously and gets a chance to know him.
I think Ammon needs to pull himself together and go to therapy. His kid too. That seems like a toxic, repressed household and they both need lots of therapy and Ammon’s kid especially needs a lot of love, compassion, and understanding that he probably won’t find within a tightly controlled Mormon household.
This book is just L O N G. It has descriptions that go on for days and I don’t know if it’s because so much of the descriptions involve nature or what, but I was bored out of my mind. The only thing that helped was skimming or outright skipping the longer paragraphs of descriptions so we could get to some talking between characters. We need more scenes with the characters together, I think. Because whatever else was going on wasn’t interesting.
The ending ends on a really weird note? It feels very abrupt. I got to it and I was just like, that’s it??? It was so strange. Yes, the text has a quick excerpt of the next book at the end, so that was something. But the ending to this first book was a bit jarring in how sudden it felt. I didn’t love that.
There’s a lot that still remembers unanswered. Does Jem ever clear out the apartment, do Jem and Tean ever return the keys, does Jem ever get a chance to tell Tean what he was caught blackmailing a guy for, or why’d Tean wait so long about pointing out he noticed another thing Jem was hiding??? I feel like Tean at least should’ve showed some sympathy and groveled about that. I know Jem forgives him but it left a sour taste to me.
So. Yeah. I didn’t particularly like this book and what there was between Jem and Tean could’ve been a lot better. The ableism and fatphobia in this book is a LOT and takes place throughout the book. Some of it is challenged, but not all the time. This wasn’t really all that fun of a read and I just hope the second book is better.
***Thanks to the author for giving me an an arc for review!***
krin's review against another edition
4.5
4.5 stars rounded down but I suspect it might be rounded up after a reread. But first I gotta move on to book 2.
thosemedalingkidsss's review against another edition
4.0
Really glad I gave this audiobook another try - I love Tean!
Can we have more wildlife nature nerds as romantic leads, please? The outdoor elements and science facts sprinkled in were a great addition to the mystery and romance, and I'm very curious how the rest of the series will play out.
Can we have more wildlife nature nerds as romantic leads, please? The outdoor elements and science facts sprinkled in were a great addition to the mystery and romance, and I'm very curious how the rest of the series will play out.
merny88's review against another edition
dark
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
I keep reading Ashe's books because he always hits with the angst, melancholy, darkness, crime and mystery - but I <b>hate</b> a lot of things about his books too.
1 - I am convinced Gregory Ashe can't cook and that's why his characters only eat junk food and trash. At least he attempted to have a character cook in this one, even if it was only to say how bad the food was.
2 - I actually do enjoy hating how long characters in books take to get together because of some other love interest getting in the way, but holy fuck why does he have to make the other love interest so rage inducing and terrible? Is it just me? It can't be. That one little shit, Nico, in Hazard and Somerset made me want to murder. Jadon in Borealis Investigations? Kill me. Ariana in Holloway Holmes. <i>No.</i> And now Ammon. At this point I assume every Ashe series has some extremely annoying love interest just hanging around being godawful but being forgiven at every single point by one of the MC's just so the endgame romance takes three books instead of one.
I hate it so much. <b>So much.</b>
It's painful and means I have to take long breaks in between reading each book in a series because I need to come down from my irritation with whichever idiot kept the horrible love interest.
I would rate this higher if Ammon didn't still exist, but I know he will continue to exist forever solely to spite me.
1 - I am convinced Gregory Ashe can't cook and that's why his characters only eat junk food and trash. At least he attempted to have a character cook in this one, even if it was only to say how bad the food was.
2 - I actually do enjoy hating how long characters in books take to get together because of some other love interest getting in the way, but holy fuck why does he have to make the other love interest so rage inducing and terrible? Is it just me? It can't be. That one little shit, Nico, in Hazard and Somerset made me want to murder. Jadon in Borealis Investigations? Kill me. Ariana in Holloway Holmes. <i>No.</i> And now Ammon. At this point I assume every Ashe series has some extremely annoying love interest just hanging around being godawful but being forgiven at every single point by one of the MC's just so the endgame romance takes three books instead of one.
I hate it so much. <b>So much.</b>
It's painful and means I have to take long breaks in between reading each book in a series because I need to come down from my irritation with whichever idiot kept the horrible love interest.
I would rate this higher if Ammon didn't still exist, but I know he will continue to exist forever solely to spite me.
holl3640's review against another edition
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
3.5
kellylayne's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0