Title: Misdirection
Series: Borealis: Without a Compass: Book Two
Author: Gregory Ashe
Publisher: Self-Published
Length: 395 Pages
Category: Mystery/Suspense
Rating: 5 Stars
At a Glance: I’m not sure I’ve ever loved a book with such vigor and yet hated some of the things that happened in it as much as I did Misdirection. It’s simultaneously brilliant—one of Gregory Ashe’s best in a body of work that has seen plenty of brilliance—and easily one of the most gut-wrenching of his books I’ve read yet.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: Finding a missing boy will be hard. Dinner with Shaw’s parents might be murder.
When a rising star in the state senate asks Shaw Aldrich and North McKinney to transport her son, Flip, to and from his drug testing appointments, they’re not happy—they don’t do babysitting jobs. Arriving at the boy’s dorm room, though, they discover that the door has been forced and that Flip has disappeared, and rumors of strange men on campus suggest that something seriously bad has happened. The students and staff at the ritzy private school have plenty to tell about Flip, but the deeper North and Shaw dig, the less they understand what might have happened to the boy.
Then one of Flip’s friends is found dead, and it’s clear that she was killed for coming too close to the truth. As North and Shaw search for answers, they meet resistance from every angle: from the school’s staff, from Flip’s friends, from the police, even from Flip’s family. Someone wants the boy to disappear—and is willing to kill to make sure it happens.
The home front has its share of trouble too. North’s ‘uncle’ Ronnie is back at his old games, drawing North and Shaw into a job that seems simple on the surface—find a missing man who might be in trouble—but they suspect that the request hides something sinister. Ronnie’s involvement, and the job itself, puts the detectives on a collision course with Shaw’s parents and a strain on their fledgling relationship.
As the days pass, North and Shaw realize time is running out for Flip and, maybe, for them as well. They have been misled from the very beginning—and they might be too late.
Review: Record scratch (def): The plot is moving at a predictable pace toward a foregone conclusion. Suddenly, something shocking happens, disrupting the action and going off somewhere unexpected. With the sound of a phonograph needle being pulled violently across a vinyl record, everything comes to a halt.
Buckle up, friends, you are in for one bumpy ride.
I’m not sure I’ve ever loved a book with such vigor and yet hated some of the things that happened in it as much as I did Misdirection. It’s simultaneously brilliant—one of Gregory Ashe’s best in a body of work that has seen plenty of brilliance—and easily one of the most gut-wrenching of his books I’ve read yet. With Emery Hazard and John-Henry Somerset, Vie Eliot, and Tean Leon and Jem Berger in the mix, that’s truly saying something. North McKinney and Shaw Aldrich have hit a jarring record-scratch of a moment in their relationship, thanks to them both needing therapy and to find some individual balance, and Ashe proves that two people can love each other deeply, in all-encompassing ways, and yet that alone is not enough to fix what lurks and twists and roils beneath. Going by the mantra “everything happens for a reason,” what has transpired in Misdirection had to play out for North and Shaw to move on, move forward, move past, and, ultimately . . . hopefully . . . end up in a better place together.
What makes this installment of the Borealis: Without a Compass series so saw-toothed and razor-sharp, apart from the snarls and snags in North and Shaw’s relationship, is the dual mysteries they’re hired to investigate—which, in the end, both affect their relationship. One hits on a personal level for North, clawing at the detritus of his abusive marriage and causing yet another bout of friction between him and his dad, while, at the same time, revealing something that becomes utterly catastrophic to his relationship with Shaw. The second case involves the disappearance of the son of a conservative Senator whose primary concern is her reelection, which exposes a family embroiled in chaos and scandal and such a heinous dysfunction that it costs the kids everything. It’s brutal, to put none too fine a point on it, and perhaps one of the most crushing mysteries this author has written yet.
I respect when an author follows the natural progression of a relationship’s arc despite what readers may want or anticipate for the sake of the romance, and regardless of how much it may wreck me to watch things happen and not be able to stop them. For the readers out there who tend to absorb the emotions and anxieties and turbulence of a story, internalizing any- and everything the author puts their characters through, then taking hours—or sometimes even days—to process those hurts and heartaches, let me tell you, I’m still bruised and grieving all the ways Misdirection went sideways, but that’s nothing less than a testament to how much I love these characters and how thoroughly invested I am in their happiness. Everything happens for a reason . . .
All the previous praise for Gregory Ashe’s storytelling prowess applies. Misdirection is compelling and provocative, poignant and, at times, the things that popped into Ashe’s brain and then out of Shaw’s mouth were laugh-out-loud funny. This book, I don’t mind admitting, left me feeling more than a bit unhinged, especially knowing there’s no quick and easy fix coming in Redirection. That doesn’t mean I’m not all-in, though, and am already girding myself for some more battered feelings.
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