Cut and Run + sequels by Abigail Roux and Madeleine Urban

[lightreads]

Cut & Run by Abigail Roux

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


FBI agents are forcibly partnered to solve murders/go undercover/protect witnesses/insert law-enforcement plot device of choice here. It’s hate at first sight, until it really, really isn’t.

This was sneaky. I read the first book and went ‘yeah, okay, that was pretty good even though x and y and z were hilariously overplayed.’ And then it was like that thing where you have the bowl of popcorn in your lap, and you don’t even know you’re eating it until it’s halfway gone. It was like that, except all of a sudden I was reading the second book. And then there were these . . . feelings! And then the third book was undercover fake-gay-married-except-really-secretly-sleeping-together and it was four in the morning and what the fuck is happening to me? By the time the fourth book came around, I wasn’t having feelings anymore. I was having feels, guys. Huge difference. And then we hit the fifth book, which coincided with some business travel, and I had one of those moments of clarity where you realize a U.S. Congressman is networking kind of frantically at you on the Acela and you’re tilting your laptop screen away from him and thinking crankily, for fuck’s sake, Congressman, just let me get back to my gay porn!. True story.

Look, these are self-indulgent to the extreme, and silly to boot, and hilariously over-the-top. But they’re also slow and sweet and angry and complicated. This is one of those stories about two people who were not looking for love, let alone looking for each other. But then it happened, and the really interesting thing is how they deal. …Or don’t deal, on occasion.

I’m feeling kind of unsatisfied with this, the way you do when you have lots of feels about something and you can’t explain why because it’s too reflexive. I have been thinking and writing a lot lately about kink (in the broader emotional sense, not the narrow sexual paraphilia sense). That knot of tension deep down in the muscle of your psyche, and kink is the thing that comes and pushes at it, and pushes, and sometimes it hurts, but it’s good. These books pushed at something to do with what I value and respect in partnerships of all sorts, and about how the things worth having don’t come easy, and, and.

That’s a little closer.




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