This one really surprised me. I love seeing LGBTQIA+ stories being told, especially ones that are outside the steamy man on man romances written by straight women or the quirky gay rom-coms. (By the way – there is nothing wrong with either of those genres AT ALL. I appreciate any positive representation.) I’m just saying that it was nice to find something different. I tend to lean toward gritty stories with unreliable narrators and questionable decisions, and you know I love a good thriller, and this book had all of this in spades and it did it without falling into demeaning stereotypes or awful cliches.

It kicks off with Oliver Park sitting outside a gay bathhouse in his car. Oliver is a former addict who was swept off his feet by Nathan Klein – a talented trauma surgeon ten years his senior from Washington DC. Nathan is in New York at a conference, and Oliver has seemed to have fallen back on his days of risky behavior. His relationship with Nathan has become a bit ho-hum, and so he’s decided to go out and have sex with a stranger. It’ll only happen just this once. He’ll get it out of his system. Nathan will be none the wiser and things will go back to normal.

Oliver spends a fair amount of time going through the reasons he shouldn’t do this, and we feel his anxiety rising. Before he knows it he’s signing in, handing over his credit card for incidentals, renting a locker and getting undressed. It doesn’t take long before a hot guy is sliding up next to him. The guy is hot. His name is Kristian, and he wants Oliver, so Oliver goes into a private room with him. They start making out. It gets hot. The guy flips Oliver around like he’s about to do him, but then Oliver feels the guy’s hand clamp down on his throat and, before he knows it, he’s fighting for his life. He barely escapes before losing consciousness. The guy chases him out of the club, but Oliver drives away. He’s completely wrecked. He gets home, freaks out, falls asleep, but there’s no denying that something awful happened and there is no way to hide this. He has an enormous bruise on his neck from where the guy was strangling him. Nathan is on his way home. What does he do?

Naturally, he’s going to do what anyone in danger of losing their stability would do – he lies. He calls Nathan via FaceTime, Nathan sees the bruises and Oliver tells him that he was robbed. A quote from chapter 6 of the book reads, “There. I’ve said it. The bomb detonates with a concussive blast. I’m no longer in control of the damage it does. Nature and chance will determine what its fires burn and consume and destroy.”

And that it does. After he’s told Nathan he was robbed, he now has to make it look as though he actually was. He has to get rid of his wallet (which helps explain why his card is missing). But then he gets a message on a hookup app and it’s Kristian. Fearing for his life, he reports the actual attack to the police. They’re on it. But then when Nathan gets home, he drives Oliver to the police to report the robbery. Now what does he do?

This is only the beginning of Oliver’s dilemma. Kristian is obviously still after him and he’s afraid that he’ll come after Nathan as well. The police think he’s a liar because they have two different versions of the story now and to make matters worse, Oliver’s ex-boyfriend – the one who used to beat him and got him hooked on drugs in the first place – has resurfaced.

The book is told from both Oliver and Nathan’s points of view and we also get flashbacks to Oliver’s life before Nathan as the book rushes toward it’s very surprising ending. To say more about the plot would give away the twisty, turny reveals.

I’ve said it before. I am usually pretty good at guessing what is going on, but this one surprised me in major ways. I love questionable characters that you want to slap, but also want to be okay. Oliver was exactly that type of character. He’s badly broken and really wants to do what’s right. He got himself in a horrible situation and watching him try to make it better – yet somehow dig himself even deeper – is both anxiety inducing and fun. You want him to be okay. You want him to be able to lie his way out of this while maintaining his relationship with his handsome sugar daddy trauma surgeon (even if Nathan refers to his awful, snobby parents as “mother and “father” which is so weird to me).

As I often do when I really get into a book, I cast it in my head. In this case, I saw Matt Rogers as Oliver, and Matt Bomer or Zachary Quinto as Nathan and then Cheyenne Jackson as Victor – Nathan’s close friend. I didn’t have anyone in particular in mind of Hector – Oliver’s ex or Kristian – the creepy, stalky, choker dude. The latter needs to be tall, and European, so maybe someone like Bill or Alexander Skarsgard.

If you like a good thriller – especially one that will keep you guessing – I highly recommend this one.