Rating: 4.5 Stars

Publisher: Self-Published

Genre:  Gay Romance/MM

Tags: Detective & Stripper, Noir Murder Mystery, Age Gap, Old but Dystopian and PNR, Dark, Moral Ambiguity

Length: 482 Kindle Pages  

Reviewer: Kazza

Purchase At: amazon

Blurb:

A beautiful stripper. A hard-boiled cop. A killer who turns murder into art.

Ash Hunter is trouble wrapped in smoke and sin—a dancer with a shadowy past and a face to die for. When police find him beside his ex-lover’s mutilated corpse, he becomes the prime suspect in a string of murders haunting Calgrave’s rain-slick streets. What’s worse, he starts dreaming the crimes… through the killer’s eyes.

Detective Rick Slade has spent years keeping his distance—from people, from desire, from the wolf beneath his skin that rises with every full moon. But when the case leads him to Ash, every instinct bristles: the kid is reckless, gorgeous, impossible… and the only link Rick has to a killer who carves faces like art.

Bound by necessity and a pull neither wants to admit, Ash and Rick are drawn into a deadly game of obsession, secrets, and dangerous revelations. In a city where monsters wear human skin, learning to trust each other might be their only chance to survive—if something far worse doesn’t wake first.

Steeped in the noir grit of dark alleys and smoky nightclubs, Drop Dead Gorgeous is a steamy MM romantic thriller for fans of supernatural detectives, morally messy men, and slow-burn heat that ignites into wildfire. Book one in the Theatre of Shadows series, blending murder mystery, paranormal suspense, and a whisper of cosmic dread, for readers who crave plot-heavy romance with teeth.

Review: 

**NSFW REVIEW**

This is an interesting book. It combines a 1940s/50s noir murder/mystery style writing, that’s not straight-coded, with a more contemporised urban dystopian vibe. It’s also PNR. Altogether it makes for a unique mashup that works. It’s set in America, because New York and LA are briefly mentioned, but the suburbs or towns, Calgrave, New Town, Duskhaven, etc, aren’t in the current US. 

Calgrave wasn’t just a city. It was a winding, sprawling cathedral of shadows, Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from steel bones and concrete skin, half-drowned in fumes and regret. A conurbation suspended between eras…

Detective Rick Slade is a star detective at Calgrave Metropolitan PD. He cracks big cases. His partner, Frank Burton the same.  But where Frank is human, more by the book, Rick is not. The werewolf in him makes him edgier and more morally grey. Rick also has favours he can call in from paranormal beings, none of whom fit todays romance standards. Even Rick is primal at the full moon in werewolf form. And he does what’s required to take down the bad guys.  

Some men were built for hierarchy, for clean lines and regulations and uniforms pressed so crisp they could slice your wrist. Rick had never been one of them. He didn’t follow the rulebook so much as circle it, a wolf testing a fence.

From the get-go, there’s a serial killer on the streets. One they’ve dubbed the Sculptor because he literally removes the face of his victims. All young. All attractive. All male. Always alive when he clinically pares flesh from bone, leaving the body staged. The Sculptor also leaves a mark or sigil painted in the victim’s blood nearby as a calling card. No one seems to know what it means but it appears ritualistic. They’ve had no leads but a young man is found with the latest victim. He’s drop dead gorgeous, where this title gets its inspiration from, and he has no reason being at the murder scene, not ones the detectives believe. He also has the victim’s blood on him and he’s not being cooperative. He doesn’t like the system. Doesn’t trust cops.  

The reader is with Ash when the fifth victim has just been staged. We get both MCs POV. Ash is  leaving after finishing his shift at Empire, a local strip club. One where he’s the club’s biggest drawcard. By far. He senses something’s happened. He hears a cry and it takes him to a grotesque scene. Ash knows it’s Jimmy. A guy he’s had an unusual repeat sexual encounter with. He can identify him because he knows the tattoo on Jimmy’s body. When Ash inevitably gets pulled into Calgrave MPD, his boss, Vinny, calls in his lawyer to help him, partially because Ash is a ‘good kid’, yeah, because the strip club owner is a saint,   99.9% because he’s a big money spinner for Vinny’s club.

“You ever seen him dance? Jesus. He’s art. Brings in more dough than the rest of ‘em combined. Girls, guys, everyone. Even the damn bartender tips him.”

Stylistically, the writing remains crime murder/mystery throughout but the PNR elements are there as well. They live in a monochromatic crime-filled city. Nothing is clean, the streets, the air. It’s wonderfully atmospheric and noir. It’s familiar but not. The detectives wear fedoras and Rick smokes cigarettes  anywhere and everywhere. Nearly everyone does. They use the word gumshoe or toots. It took me back to a time where that was the norm. I could see Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade alongside Rick.

Eclipse carried the kind of reputation that came with whispered passwords and rumors stacked higher than the tabs. A faded marquee promised ‘Men After Dark—Every Flavor, Every Night.’

It’s not like a lot of other dystopias where there’s no technology, or people are hunkering down in barren wastelands. There are laptops, the Yakuza control drugs and trafficking. That’s more contemporary in construct. But then the author pulls the reader back in time again to when women were called dollface, broad, dame. Made me think American B&W noir movies. Bogie and Bacall. Edward G Robinson. Like Jimmy Cagney was about to stroll out from behind a door and say-

“Take it easy, sister,” he said, his tone low and even. “We’re just here to talk.”

At the same time, Rick isn’t interested in women. Not sexually, even though he was previously married. Good looking, twenty-something guys? Yep. Rick is all about that. Ash is exactly that. The MCs sexuality definitely doesn’t fit into 40s or 50s noir. So the writing is a bending of time and place and tropes. It’s clever. 

Rick strode like a tempest in a suit, all muscles and quiet menace. At six foot five and thirty-eight, he didn’t just walk through the station—he dominated it.

It takes a while to get to know the MCs. It takes a moment or three for them to gel together. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to see them as love interests but then they just clicked into place. For a while I was asking myself, what is Ash? Because he has something interesting going on. Some abilities. I can see where he’s unaware or unsure because they’ve been kind of subtle or the things happening around him could be coincidental. When Ash starts being able to see through the Sculptor’s eyes in his own dreams, he’s understandably disturbed. How does something like that happen? 

His shoulders squared. Whatever was waiting for him in that room, whatever this boy was, he was far from harmless. But god help him, Rick didn’t want to be saved. 

Of course, in the background is the chief shaking his fist at our intrepid detectives, telling them to get this case solved, or else, and a pesky reporter who turns up and knows things the cops don’t like or want printed about the mounting bodies. 

There isn’t much more I can say about the actual storyline in Drop Dead Gorgeous. There are eleven parts that are categorised by day and date. Then the chapters, or divides within chapters, are headed up by time of day. The writing is very, very descriptive and can get a little bogged down in the minutiae of a setting. A bit less description would have made the story tighter. Having said that, I enjoy the writer’s turn of phrase. I also liked his characters. Everyone is degrees of interesting. It kept me turning e-book pages. Once the sex started, it was raw. Like the story. Like the characters.

Rick is big man and werewolf built. Romance readers know how that works. Height, bulk, and…well, huge werewolf cock. The sex can be hella descriptive about how far that cock goes inside Ash. How far down his throat. One part was a fuck-a-palooza. The sex matched the grittier storytelling. 

CW: For readers who need to know, Rick and Ash become an item but not before Ash has sex with other men. No problem for me. It’s realistic. They aren’t together for a while but I know some readers don’t like it.  

Overall:

As already mentioned, this story is an interesting blending of styles and tropes. I’ve read two of this author’s books now. The Lost Pilgrim couldn’t be more different to Drop Dead Gorgeous. I appreciate range. I’m now looking forward to book #2, this will be the seventh series book where I’m waiting for the next book. The list is getting longer. The book doesn’t end on a cliffhanger but there’s more to come. Ash and Rick have stayed with me since finishing. I don’t see myself forgetting them or this story in a hurry. Always a good thing. For Drop Dead Gorgeous, it’s 4.5 Stars!