Title: Final Orders
Series: Hazard and Somerset: Arrows in the Hand: Book Five
Author: Gregory Ashe
Publisher: Self-Published
Length: 410 Pages
Category: Mystery
Rating: 5 Stars
At a Glance: The saying goes that having a child is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. I can’t fathom how that could be truer than it is for Emery Hazard. Final Orders is nothing less than an emotional-wringer of a story, and I will gladly indulge in these characters as long as Gregory Ashe continues to write them.
Reviewed By: Lisa
Blurb: An embattled author. Fanatical parents. A son who can’t stay out of trouble. It’s the last one that’ll probably kill him.
When Emery Hazard gets drawn into a brawl at a monthly school board meeting, he knows he’s in trouble; his husband, John-Henry Somerset, is chief of police, and they’re already under enough scrutiny as they try to finalize their foster son’s permanency plan.
Hazard’s actions, however, have an unexpected consequence: a woman shows up at his office the next day, and she wants to hire him to protect her mother. Loretta Ames is a famous—and famously troublesome—author, and a string of recent attempts on her life suggests that someone is determined to get rid of her. Under pressure from his assistant, Hazard takes the job, assuming that it will be two days of babysitting before Loretta returns to New York.
Her murder changes everything. To find the killer, Hazard and Somers will enter a murky world of concerned parents, entitled teenagers, internet trolls, and a whole lot of grassroots crazy. But nothing is straightforward about the investigation, and even Loretta’s daughter seems to have her own reasons to want her mother dead. And when the killer abducts Colt’s friend, Hazard and Somers realize they are running out of time, and they must race to save him before it’s too late.
Review: Gregory Ashe’s Final Orders is a ripped-from-the-headlines novel. Emery Hazard and John-Henry Somerset have faced, and solved, their fair share of hate crimes in Wahredua, but this one hits a little bit different. They are no strangers to intolerance and bigotry, and this book encompasses what happens when prejudice, censorship, and conspiracy theories are weaponized, fanaticized, radicalized, and parents poison their own children with hate and, in turn, make those children hate themselves.
Final Orders an emotional-wringer of a story that kept me on edge, as a few dog-in-the-manger parents who wish to inflict the ideology they cloak in righteousness upon everyone else are demanding the removal of a book from the curriculum—a book with LGBTQ+ characters written by a lesbian author. Their goal is to cause moral panic and outrage in the community under the pretext that the teacher who assigned the book, Theo Stratford, is “grooming” their children, and they isolate a provocative scene from the overall context and message of the story as their “proof”. The author herself is not unproblematic, however, and is no stranger to confrontation, which is why her daughter hires Emery to watch out for and protect her from outside threats while she’s in Wahredua on a speaking engagement at the high school.
When the author turns up dead, a copy of her book burning beside her body, Hazard and Somers go into action to find the killer through a twisted series of revelations. And it wouldn’t be a case if their foster son, Colt, wasn’t somehow tied up in it.
The saying goes that having a child is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body. I can’t fathom how that could be truer than it is for Emery Hazard. Colt is an impulsive, moody, and brittle teenager who fiercely—yet still cautiously—loves his family, but can’t seem to stop himself from doing things that leave both Emery and John-Henry wondering how the hell they’re going to survive loving the boy so much. The potential damage Colt’s impulsivity could inflict would be devastating, and watching Hazard beg, plead, and make promises he’s not even sure he can keep so he doesn’t lose Colt to the foster system is brutally gut-wrenching. Because, the truth is, there are no two people better suited to parent Colt than Hazard and Somers. Watching their bond grow and solidify over the course of these books is a strong affirmation of this, and in Final Orders the impact of that bond multiplies exponentially.
I fully admit I’ve lost all objectivity when it comes to these characters and this series. Hazard and Somers have joined my short and exclusive list of imaginary people I will gladly indulge in as long as Gregory Ashe continues to write them. They go where others may fear to tread, still facing down the past and grappling with the complex set of emotions tied to it even as they risk their lives for the sake of others. They have built a family and a core group of friends that only serve to enrich them—Hazard has probably even created a PowerPoint to show how they could do more and with greater efficiency. And I have somehow even managed to want to know more about Gray Dulac, which I couldn’t have predicted in my wildest imagination.
The final vignette of the upcoming Off Duty collection gives readers a lovely little tease, introducing a new character and offering up something interesting for Emery Hazard to brood over with a vigor only he can manage. This is all to say I hope we see more of Wahredua, Missouri, in the future.
You can buy Final Orders here:
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