The Spec Press, $0.99, ISBN 978-1370981014
Contemporary Romance, 2016
Meet Eric Hyer-Masterson.
He cheated on his wife with Coy, and Jane, the wife, caught him in the act. She then subjected him to silent treatment, and he had the temerity to ask her whether she had ever loved him. She said no—I don’t know what else she was supposed to say after she’s caught him slapping salamis with another bloke—so our hero is now finalized the divorce at the opening of the story and he’s like, phew, now he can finally be an “adult” and stop having to live in the wife’s shadow. You see, he moved to Pullman for the sake of the wife’s career, the people are too vapid for him (although at least bloke caught his fancy), the culture is backwater hell where he is concerned, and now, yay, he is free…
This guy is the protagonist of Coy Trick.
Coy now wants to get busy with him full time, but Eric kicks him out too, because wah wah, he doesn’t know what he want, he doesn’t want to think, wah wah wah.
Because of the short length of this story, Eric doesn’t get to experience much character development. He doesn’t become more accepting of people that are different from him, or man up and take responsibility for his own shortcomings. No, instead, here he finally finds the courage within to shag Coy full time in the end because it’s so hard for a hot guy to commit to another hot guy that he’s already cheated on his wife with, so it’s not like they need to be coy and have a few dinner dates first before grabbing one another’s johnny.
Eric is, in many ways, like the protagonist of those lad-lit stories that are fulled of man-children that spend the entire novel whining about their first world problems. Some people will like these stories, while I’m sadly one of those readers that roll up my eyes when confronted with these whiny gits. It’s not that I care about him cheating or being a petulant whining sausage dog, mind you; it’s the lack of good character development that gets to me.
The narrative is well written, I’d give the author that. There is a lovely cadence here that makes this one a pleasure to read. It’s just too bad that I don’t give a hoot about Eric’s love story.
