Good lord, am I going to get sucked into a massive thirteen-part m/m murder-detective series?
This was gruesome, and explicitly so. The author presents a whole list of triggers up front, for which I was ultimately grateful, since I wasn’t totally surprised by what the book has between its virtual covers. However, McCade’s first book is not the frantic sort of roller-coaster of emotion and violence that Gregory Ashe gives us in his “Hazard and Somerset” series. It is more violent, or upsetting, in some ways, but otherwise rather different.
McCade’s prose is elegant, precise, cool. There is much beautiful writing in here, darkly descriptive and evocative. But it is neither cold nor clinical. Malcolm Khalaji is a Persian half-Jew, in his forties, working homicide in the Baltimore Police Department. He is a loner, with personal baggage that we do not get to unpack during this first book. But he is also compassionate and smart and cultured. The partner he is assigned at the gut-wrenching start to this grisly murder mystery is Seong-Jae Yoon, a thirty-something child of Korean refugees just transferred from the Los Angeles police force. He, too, has baggage about which we only get the fainted hints. Also a loner, and detachedly formal in a very Asian way, Yoon is also compassionate, but wound very tight, his emotions suppressed for some as-yet unknown reason.
Yoon and Khalaji have to deal with each other in order to get a grip on this baffling and horrifying crime. The interplay between these men, low-key and quiet, but also very tense, is spiced with the discreetly obvious truth that they find each other extremely attractive, even as they irritate each other constantly. It is a soft sizzle that obviously, if the reader has patience, will pay off in future books (um, episodes). What I was struck by, however, is the respect these two too-similar men show each other right from the start. This is a wolf and a tiger forced to share the same space. They are not happy, but they acknowledge each other’s skills. McCade manages to get all of this across without exaggeration or high drama.
One significant fact is that we have a m/m book in which neither gay main character is white, nor is their police captain, a Latina woman of great presence in spite of minimal page time. It is a very gay book in other ways, too, although not in particularly happy ways.
It was an upsetting book to read at times, and it was largely the author’s skill as a writer that got me through the toughest parts. You know that Khalaji and Yoon will not let us down, will not let each other down. The ending is a set up for the next book, and a clue as to the larger mystery arc that will presumably hover over the entire thirteen-part series.
I still have no idea what the subtitle “The Cardigans” is supposed to mean. It’s a Swedish rock group, but I couldn’t find any key that explains what this means anywhere in the book. Am I supposed to think that this would be soundtrack in the background of a televised series? Sigh. Maybe I’ll never know.
I have book two on my kindle: “Criminal Intentions: Junk Shop Blues.” God help me.
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