Title: Police Brutality
Series: Hazard and Somerset: Union of Swords: Book Two
Author: Gregory Ashe
Publisher: Self-Published
Length: 422 Pages
Category: Murder Mystery
At a Glance: Police Brutality is what every Gregory Ashe novel is. Essentially Everything. I am spent and I can’t wait for more.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: For the first time in a long while, Emery Hazard’s life is good. His new business as a private detective is taking off. Things are good at home. He loves his boyfriend, John-Henry Somerset; he loves their daughter. He might even love the new friends they’ve found. There’s only one problem: Somers has been talking about marriage.
When a former colleague, Walter Hoffmeister, comes to Hazard and hires him to look into a series of anonymous death threats, Hazard eagerly jumps on the distraction. Hoffmeister might be a jerk, but he’s a paying jerk, and Hazard isn’t convinced the threats are serious.
Until, that is, Hoffmeister is almost gunned down on Hazard’s doorstep. As Hazard investigates more deeply, he learns that more than one person in Wahredua has a reason to wish Hoffmeister dead. His search takes him to the Ozark Volunteers, reincarnated as the Bright Lights movement, but it also leads him into a sanctuary of radical Christianity. Meanwhile, an antifa activist has arrived in town, calling for Hoffmeister’s death and threatening total war with the Bright Lights.
As Hazard continues to look for answers, he becomes a target too—and not just because he’s helping Hoffmeister. The Keeper of Bees is still at large, and the killer hasn’t lost interest in Emery Hazard. Not yet. Not, Hazard begins to suspect, until the Keeper has taken everything Hazard holds dear.
Review: Police Brutality? More like author brutality. But, why else do I read Gregory Ashe than to be put through the emotional wringer and then thank him for it later? There is something to be said about a couple of characters who can take you to hell and back, and make you glad you were along for the ride. Emery Hazard and John-Henry Somerset send me so sublimely, book after book, and this one left me more than a little punch-drunk for the undertaking. I would go so far as to say that Police Brutality is, paradoxically, the most emotionally gut-wrenching and most romantically uplifting book yet in the entire Hazard and Somerset collection. The things these two men do to and for each other, I swear…
Hazard and Somerset are messy and complicated, and there are always so many underlying issues and dynamics at play between them. When they fight, they fight dirty, and it hurts. It hurts but it’s real, and there are lessons to be learned in that. It hurts but I also appreciate how those fights always move them forward. And I love how Ashe allows them to make up. Em and John wage these hard, brutal verbal assaults, but then the making up is always so soft and yet no less emotionally complex; those soft words may not come as easily, but they are always full and eloquent, and what is said matters as much as that they are wound up in each other, touching, when the words are spoken. One of the things Ashe does so well is to distinguish that this relationship is grounded in Hazard and Somers’ internal and external conflicts, but it’s also about how they apologize and allow the proper accommodations for each other’s shortcomings and transgressions. That matters. They knew each other’s Achilles heels before they ever even thought about making the leap from partners to boyfriends. That’s one of the single most crucial elements of their relationship—they know they fight hard, they know they love harder, and they grace each other with absolution always. They love one another through better and through worse. They may falter but they are there, together, to take one more step in the right direction.
Of course, there is also murder. To paraphrase another of my favorite fictional characters, Wahredua is a horrible murder town,* and what would a book in this series be without a puzzle to solve? The death of one of Wahredua’s “finest” (p.s. Hoffmeister was not fine; he was a mouth-breathing knuckle-dragger) not only leaves Hazard clientless after being hired by Hoffmeister himself to try and stop whoever was stalking and threatening him, but it leaves Somers and his new partner, Gray Dulac (more on Gray in a minute…), with an investigation on their hands. Which causes no small amount of personal issues for Em and John as their cases once again overlap. Being so accustomed to working together like a finely tuned instrument of investigative prowess, their being at odds because Hazard is no longer a police detective, but a private one, becomes a sticking point and another weapon between them. Hazard being distracted through much of this book, his thoughts and emotions being pulled in so many different directions, left him wrong-footed and overlooking clues he’d normally process and categorize with an algorithmic efficiency, which is such an anomaly for him. But, sometimes realizing you’re human isn’t a bad thing.
Now, let’s talk about Gray Dulac. I can’t even.
As is par for the course for a Gregory Ashe novel, there are layers, topped with other layers, topped with a heavy overlay of passion and pathos. Wahredua itself continues to play an integral role as a character itself. If it weren’t for its cringey, ugly little underbelly—the dirty cops, the corruption, the bigotry and bias, the hatred and the killings—there would be little to keep Hazard and Somers occupationally occupied. And there is still Chief Cravens, whose side I’m never quite sure she’s playing for. There is some difficult exposition about the worst of human deeds laid bare in this book, and the series as a whole, a stark and striking commentary about the failures of the social experiment and where we, as humans, so often fall short of success.
There are friends and family, too, who are important to both Emery and John. There is Gray Dulac… Sweet cherub-cheeked baby Jesus, there’s him, and I’m not altogether sure he isn’t some sort of payback for the way John always annoyed Emery. That boy… I’ve never wanted to strangle someone so much, and then think, aw, maybe he’s not so bad, and then I want to strangle him some more. With vigor. He’s bringing along a new man, though—Darnell Kirby, who I probably love. I don’t know yet, but there’s a compelling case for it—so Dulac can stay, I guess. I need more Darnell, no question there.
Police Brutality is what every Gregory Ashe novel is. Essentially Everything. I am spent and I can’t wait for more.
*thanks be to Jordan L. Hawk for Widdershins, the original horrible murder town
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