First You Fall - Scott Sherman

[PaperMoon]

On just one evening, Kevin Conner - 23 years old, 5 foot 3 blonde and blue-eyed rent-boy (brought to my mind the lyrics of that 1920’s song – Has Anybody Seen My Gal?), has his fairly set-up life turned upside down when his past and present worlds collide. His mentor-benefactor falls to his death from his high-rise apartment and his first-love ex-boyfriend Tony from seven years ago arrives at the scene of the crime as the investigating officer.

When investigations uncover more than just a routine gay suicide of an older man … and Kevin becomes a suspect to possible murder when he appears in the deceased mentor’s will, the police i.e. Tony starts taking more than a healthy interest in Kevin’s motives and moves. To further complicate Kevin’s life, his over-powering high maintenance mother (combination of Blanche from Golden Girls and Marie from Everybody Loves Raymond) moves in when she suspects her husband of cheating on her … All of a sudden, Kevin is hiding porn from his mother, hiding his call-boy career from the prying Tony, hiding from someone who is definitely aiming their killer sights on silencing him forever.

As an unwitting but keen amateur sleuth, Kevin is definitely winningly appealing and charmingly endearing. The author Scott Sherman does not pull back in giving us several scenes of a call-boy at work … some amusing hi-jinks are outlined and I hadn’t had such a chuckle over gay sex-games since reading Can’t Buy Me Love (Chris Kenry). There are plenty of suspects, red-herrings and a great cliff-hanger ending, although I did guess the identity of the murderer earlier on in the piece.

As a character, Kevin reads like Greg Herren’s Scotty Bradley and Rick Copp’s Jarrod Jarvis. The dialogue is snappy, very funny and moves the plot along at breath-taking speed – particularly whenever his sex-mad best friend Freddie (African-American adopted by Jews) appears on the scene to lend a supporting hand. The dance of romance re-kindled between Kevin and the married Tony is sufficient to keep me wanting to find out what happens next in the next two books in this mystery series.

[Ulysses]

I could have sworn I wrote Amazon kindle reviews for all three of these - because I read them with great hesitation and ended up thinking they were really fun and well written. The whole "whore with the heart of gold" set up really bothers me - but only because that's my hangup. Great characters, surprisingly complex emotional narratives, and spine-tingling murder mysteries with a gay hero.