Christopher Fletcher is a habitual liar. He’s also an author, so he’s well versed in creating fictions, and he uses that talent like an armor to protect a Christopher no one truly knows, maybe not even Christopher himself.
Chris has crafted a variety of persona in his adult life—the timid writer, the dutiful son seeking God’s benevolence through the approval of his parents, the fiancé, even a Self whom he has named Robin, an orphan and a club twink. Robin is the doppelganger, who, through the looking glass, is the mirror opposite of Chris: confident where Chris is shy, colorful where Chris is subdued. These different characters reside in a single man and he has become so accustomed to weaving a tangled web of lies over the years that he practices to deceive even himself.
Ian McCallum is not the sort of man who frequents clubs like the Gold Coast, but he’s there playing wingman to his best friend Trent on the night he meets Robin, the blue haired club twink that a man like Ian would never be attracted to. Only he is. And for a man like Ian, a man for whom being in control is an imperative, the out of control Robin effortlessly draws Ian into his web and into a place where survival for Ian becomes a question of whether he can come to terms with how much of himself he’s willing to compromise for the sake of the man with whom he’s fallen in love, even the parts of that man that never truly existed.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them because no one knows himself better than he himself does. Unless you’re a man who has spent his entire life trying to be who his parents expect him to be—perfect—and has been pretending so long that he’s not entirely sure which parts of himself are real. White lies, small lies, big lies, lies by omission: Christopher has spun them all. The question for Ian becomes whether he can stop expecting Chris to be someone other than who he is and who he needs to be to cope with his dysfunctional childhood.
They say truth is stranger than fiction, and the series of unfortunate events that happen to Ian McCallum and Christopher Robin Fletcher are the sorts of things any author would kill for his Muse to visit upon him, because they are the stuff of which only a writer could dream up to have happen to two protagonists in a novel—bar fights, plane crashes, stalkers, kidnappers, shoot-outs—Kaje Harper keeps Ian and Chris busy just trying to stay alive, let alone coming to terms with the way they feel for each other.
There’s a lot of plot to absorb in Lies and Consequences, so much so that there were times I found myself becoming a little impatient to get to the resolution of the story. Every situation Ian and Chris were involved in interfered with and complicated their relationship even further, but those dangers and deceptions also helped to progress things between the two men, to help Ian come to terms with his feelings for Chris, so it’s difficult to find too much fault based on my own eagerness to see how things would unfold.
Kaje Harper has generously offered Lies and Consequences for FREE, not terribly common for a full-length novel; I’d definitely say the time I spent with Chris and Ian was well worth the cost.
Download Lies and Consequences HERE.