Title: Codirection
Series: Borealis: Without a Compass: Book Four
Author: Gregory Ashe
Publisher: Self-Published
Length: 335 Pages
Category: Mystery/Suspense
Rating: 5 Stars
At a Glance: North and Shaw put me through the emotional wringer once again in Codirection, and I don’t expect that will change going forward simply because they’ve reached a turning point in their relationship. The mystery, of course, is exceptional, and I might even say it’s one of Ashe’s most disturbing yet, thanks in every way to the heinousness of the crimes and against whom the crimes are committed.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: They killed a girl to keep their secrets. They won’t stop there.
A new home, a fresh start, a chance to do things right this time—and Shaw and North are determined to make it work. But the night of their housewarming party, things don’t go as planned. A reporter arrives, wanting to talk to North about his ex-husband, his father, and a criminal syndicate. No sooner have they gotten rid of her than another unwanted guest appears: a street boy named Nik, whom Shaw met months before, begging them to help him find his missing friend, Malorie.
Retracing Malorie’s steps, North and Shaw learn about the dangerous demimonde of runaway teenagers. Their investigation takes them into the path of men and women who have learned to profit off the suffering and abandonment of children: shelters, clinics, labor brokers, and pimps.
Meanwhile, North’s Uncle Ronnie is set on revenge, and his target this time is North’s father. As North struggles to track down Ronnie and put an end to the danger, he finds himself considering a deal with the devil, and the offer might be too good to pass up.
When North and Shaw find Malorie’s body, evidence suggests she was murdered—and that her death is connected in some way with a truck stop halfway across the state. But as they draw closer to the truth, the danger grows. The people who killed Malorie have the Borealis detectives in their sights, and North and Shaw must race to save their own lives before the killers can strike again.
Review: And thus concludes one of the most excruciating, heart-wrenching, nail-biting relationship arcs I have ever read. Author Gregory Ashe has delivered (finally!) North McKinney and Shaw Aldrich to a place I wasn’t altogether confident they’d make it to when the Without a Compass quadrilogy started—a place where they’ve both begun to participate in the give-and-take and compromises and communication in a relationship—but lo and behold, here they are. I’m not gullible enough to believe it’s all smooth sailing from now on, though.
If I’m being honest, I still don’t fully get their dynamic, not in the same way as I’ve connected with Ashe’s other characters, but North and Shaw make it work, so that’s all that matters. The best, and often most agonizing, part of it is they got to this place in their own time and in their own way, which works because it doesn’t mean they’ve altered the fundamentals that make them, them; they’ve merely upgraded the basics to keep them, them. But something has shifted now, and let’s just say I will probably need most of the next set of books to focus on Shaw thanks to the lengths he has proved he’s willing go to, to keep North safe.
The mystery in Codirection is, as I’ve come to expect, exceptional, and I might even say it’s one of Ashe’s most disturbing yet, thanks in every way to the heinousness of the crimes and against whom the crimes are committed. It is a well-known fact that a criminal will do any- and everything to protect their revenue stream, which means greed is the catalyst—isn’t it almost always?—and what the people involved will exploit to make money off the need and vulnerability of others is the accelerant added to the danger of this investigation. North and Shaw both go through some things, and added to that is the threat North is facing from good old Uncle Ronnie which, perhaps somewhat incongruously, serves to provide for some really touching moments with North and his dad.
And, of course, North’s life couldn’t fully swirl the drain without some help from his ex-husband, Tucker, who is still determined to cause trouble and is very likely not done doing so just yet. North also now owes a debt to someone even more powerful than Ronnie. The reporter sniffing around in his business could also prove problematic, so yes, plenty of good stuff to ruminate over while we wait for the author to revisit these characters.
For those of us whose empathy and emotions get tangled up in a good story, the toll some books take, and some characters exact from us, hits just that little bit harder. North and Shaw are those characters, and these are those books. In fact, Gregory Ashe excels at wringing every ounce of compassion, horror, heartache, and even anger from me simply because he has a knack for writing people with full personalities and lives, so much so that I grow to care about them even if they don’t exist anywhere but on the page, and despite the fact I don’t always understand why they do what they do, or say what they say, or think what they think. That breadth of connection not only applies to his protagonists but to those who are important to them as well. It’s almost impossible not to invest in some way in every character who has a role to play in getting this author’s stories from point A to point B, even the antagonists you love to hate, which, to me, is the mark of a great storyteller.
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