Brushback by Jamie Scofield

Title: Brushback
Author: Jamie Scofield
Publisher: Dancing Fools Press
Length: Novel/325 pages
Buy the book: Ebook,  Paperback

Blurb:

EVAN AUSTIN, PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

It couldn’t be simpler. All Evan Austin needed to do was find R.J. Gibson before his eighteenth birthday and the kid would inherit a huge trust fund. Everybody would go home happy: R.J. would be set for life, the mom would appease her guilt, and maybe Evan would finally be able to put a tragic case from his past behind him.

But nothing in life is ever that easy. Adding to the confusion are a young woman whose boyfriend liked to slap her around and the murder of an Assistant U.S. District Attorney, for which one of Evan’s former clients is now a suspect. Throw in his growing attraction to R.J.’s guardian, artist Roman Cavanaugh, plus the Mariners having another really bad season, and Evan’s got a bit more on his plate than he can handle.

Not that it’s ever stopped him before.

Review:

I love a good mystery.  One where you can really get your teeth into solving it yourself, but which leads you up and down the garden path with its false clues and red herrings.  One which contains a range of characters some of whom you know you can trust, but many more of which you are unsure of their true motivations.  One which resolves everything to your satisfaction with a dramatic, and in this book’s case, bloody conclusion.  Brushback was all that and more for me, and despite a couple of tiny niggles, is a book which I can highly recommend to those who, like me, love a good mystery.

The strength of the book lies with its first person narrator Evan, who is an ex-cop turned private detective.  If you mix together Adrien English and Jake Riordan from the Adrien English mysteries by Josh Lanyon and then add a dash of Dave Branstetter from the Joseph Hansen books, then you’ve pretty much got the character of Evan.  He’s a tough, pragmatic and uncompromising man who is just as likely to use his fists as well as his brains to solve a mystery or make a point.  Underneath the tough exterior is a man who cares about injustice, especially when he sees the weak being exploited by the strong, and who has a great deal of love and affection for his friends.  When we first meet him, Evan is on a blind date which he calmly interrupts to prevent a man hitting his girlfriend, leading to repercussions later in the book.  In many ways it’s difficult to describe Evan’s character with any great coherency because he’s got so many layers to him.  As the book progresses the reader gets to see each layer revealed showing how complex a man Evan really is.  He’s also a man of opposites who is just as comfortable in the squalor of the poorer areas of town as he is in the opulence of the rich houses.  He is a skilled fighter who also has a love of interior design and lush furnishings.  He has been hurt by lovers in the past, but hasn’t allowed himself to become bitter and continues to search for Mr Right.  I liked him a great deal, especially as he isn’t always shown to be to the perfect detective.  He makes mistakes, gets himself into tricky situations, finds himself outwitted on occasion.  This made Evan all the more human and I felt all his annoyance and frustrations during the times things went wrong for him.

The story is divided into two plots: The first plot-line is the case which Evan is investigating.  He has been employed to find a young man and his father for a British solicitors firm who wish to pass them details of a substantial inheritance.  Evan’s research leads him to the young man, R.J., and his guardian, Roman.  The plot then takes several twists and turns as Evan tries to work out exactly what the terms of R.J.’s inheritance is, whilst also fighting an attraction to Roman.  Part way through the book this plot splits again as new, and dangerous, characters are brought into play and Evan finds that he has to protect R.J. from those who wish to harm him.  The way that the plot developed was quite fascinating as was the way that Evan’s feelings for Roman and R.J. moved away from the purely professional to the more personal and affectionate.  Evan’s tentative romance with Roman is developed slowly through the book to the extent that by the end there had been a connection made, a promise of a start for the two men, but nothing more than that.  Those of you looking for erotic content are going to be disappointed but I liked that the romance was very much low key, a subplot to the main mystery.  I also liked that Evan’s growing feelings for Roman were not separate from the story as a whole but had a direct impact on the events that happen in the book.  One of the little niggles I had with this book is centred on the relationship between Roman and Evan.  There are several points in the book where the relationship starts to move forward, through discussion or through the physical.  Nearly every time this happens the men are interrupted by phone calls, people arriving or some other event.  The first couple of times this happened were fine but when it happened every single time, I began to tire of it and felt that it was getting a little clichéd.

The second plot involved the young woman Taneesha and her abusive boyfriend, Jamal.  This plot was completely separate from the above, except in the way that some of the events connected with it impacted on Evan’s physical and emotional state.  In many ways this plot was used to highlight how physically tough Evan is, but also the lengths which he will go to in order to help a complete stranger.  It added greatly to the characterisation of Evan and for that reason alone was important to the overall story.

My only other niggle about the book was that the climatic end to the story was a little overblown.  Then again, I often find that with mystery novels so it didn’t bother me too much.  It was slightly jarring after the carefully paced, emotionally tight story to suddenly find a huge action/fight/showdown scene at the end and gave the ending a cinematic feel which was out of character with the rest of the book

I could go on at much greater length about all the things I loved about this book from the well rounded secondary characters which included a number of positive female characters, to the depth of emotion the story brought to me.  I finished the book quite sad to leave Evan, but pleased that this is the first part of a series. There are a couple of threads left hanging at the end, one of which is the development of Roman and Evan’s relationship and another which I am assuming is going to be the bulk of the mystery for book two.  If you like complex characters and well plotted mysteries then you can’t go wrong with Brushback.  I thought it was terrific and can’t recommend it highly enough.