Object of Desire (Bitter Legacy 2) by Dal MacLean

[Ulysses]

Object of Desire (Book 2 of 3)
By Dal MacLean
One Block Empire/Blind Eye Books, 2018
Five stars

“You know he wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“Aye, that’s what the guy said in Psycho.”

This detective mystery is gripping, a tightly woven puzzle that keeps you twisting right to the end. One of three, so far, from the pen of Dal MacLean, it is only tangentially linked to the other two (Bitter Legacy precedes it and Blue on Blue follows it); but you should still read them in order.

This is not a romance, although it is very much concerned with love. True love. Obsessive love. Fear of love. Self-destructive love. Tom Gray is a pro at avoiding love, but as a top-tier fashion model, he is also the ultimate object of desire. Putting his rising career first, he long-since rejected the love of Will Frost, a London police detective who had developed too many expectations. Two years later, Tom finds himself needing Will’s help when accusations begin to fly after his boss’s gruesome death.

Tom is a difficult guy to like. The fact that he stole his boss’s husband, whom he doesn’t actually love, just adds to the difficulty. He comes across as a hypocrite and a narcissist; but at his first meeting with Will Foster, who left the police force and is now a private investigator, we begin to see that there might be more than shallow vanity attached to Tom’s physical perfection.

A suicide becomes a murder. Luxurious gifts for Tom appear, each with a message from an unknown admirer. Tom’s best friends gather around him, trying to protect him from ruinous scandal. And yet Tom finds himself adrift, increasingly powerless to control his life, the one thing at which he’s always excelled. As ugly incidents pile up and Tom understands that someone is trying to frame him, he no longer knows who he can trust. Only Will Foster, the man he humiliated and walked out on, stands steadfast by his side, determined to solve the mystery and save his career.

There is no fat in this plot. For a book this long, it is as lean and muscular as MacLean’s carefully delineated characters. I thought I had cottoned onto the culprit halfway through—but then I got confused. And more confused. The author jerked me around over and over until I completely sympathized with Tom’s feelings of disorientation. As the author digs into Tom’s unravelling psyche, we begin to understand what really motivates him, and that the roots of his personal unhappiness are profoundly tied to – amazingly – love.