More library romance:
Hot Target, by Suzanne Brockmann, got a lot of buzz when it first came out because it had a same-sex romance as its secondary plot. Despite a bad experience with another Brockmann, I appreciated the gutsiness of including a gay relationship, so decided to give it a try when it was available at the library.
There are actually two gay relationships in the story. Apparently the books in this series contain three plotlines: a primary romance, a secondary romance, and a World War II story. In this case, a movie’s being made about two romantically-involved WWII soldiers, and the producer is getting death threats over portraying one of them as gay, so the studio hires a private security team. The producer and one of the team members make up the primary romance. In the secondary thread, there’s a triangle between the producer’s brother (so far in the closet that he’s eating Turkish delight with the White Witch); the FBI agent investigating the death threats; and the FBI agent’s ex-lover. For great parallelism, the brother plays the closeted WWII soldier in the movie, while the ex-lover plays the openly-gay soldier.
That sounds a lot more complicated than it is, probably, but the complications are what makes the secondary thread far more interesting than the primary thread. The emotional difficulties faced by the primary characters feel quite perfunctory [*], showing up out of nowhere and then dropped nearly as quickly by the pressures of the plot. The permutations of the secondary triangle are messy and interesting, and I like Jules (the FBI agent) quite a bit. For him, and for the other interesting secondary characters—it is a well-peopled novel—I decided to keep reading them out of the library.
[*] Fandom has eaten my brain, because it took some effort not to write “pasted on yay” there.
so far in the closet that he’s eating Turkish delight with the White Witch Kate, is this your own line? I’ve never heard it before, and I may need to steal it!
Jean: I’ve heard “so far in the closet that he’s in Narnia” several times before, and this is just an exaggerated variant–there’s no need to steal, I’m happy to offer it up in the unlikely event that it actually is original!