New York gay Homicide detective Clint Folsom, to the consternation of his partner and current lover, Danny Thompson, appears to be sinking ever deeper into his fetish for almost-constant, on-the-edge rough sex.
Danny doesn’t know half the danger Clint is in, though, when they are put on two cases, one the murder of a key witness in a mobster trial and the other a serial killer on a spree on the docks in lower Manhattan, and the victims all fall into Clint’s demographic: sexually active, insatiable, and edgy bottoms who are in their late twenties or early thirties and blond, who have movie-star looks, and who cruise the gay bars of Chelsea and Christopher Street. Clint only begins to understand the danger himself as he sees the two cases begin to intersect—at him. He sinks deeper into the web of want and need as he struggles with the decision of keeping his discoveries about the cases to himself to hide his sexual binges from his partner and lover, Danny, or to not make the mistake his former partner and lover, Brad, did by investigating on his own and possibly winding up dead, as Brad did.
This is the ninth detective mystery in the Clint Folsom series and is set, chronological, right behind the fourth book, Death in Eden.
He turned his head. The beefy black guy in bed beside him had his eyes open and turned toward him. They had a questioning look in them. Clint didn’t have any difficulty deciding what the guy wanted.
Clint didn’t have the foggiest notion who this guy was. He could guess, though, what he had been doing in his bed, although fuck knew how he’d gotten there.
“Has anyone ever told you you look like—?”
“Oh, f*** f***,” Clint growled, not letting that sentence finish. He rolled away from the black guy and stumbled out of bed and to his bathroom. Sun was streaming through the gauzy curtains of his bedroom window and he could hear the street noise coming up from below the window. He’d lived better than this when he’d been with Brad and he could live better than this now if he wanted to—he was a regular million-dollar-baby. But going back to the way he’d been living before he’d won, and then lost, Brad was part of his punishment of himself for being alive when so many others, including Brad, were dead. So, what he had here was a main living room with kitchen L on the third floor above a neighborhood grocery closet and a bedroom small enough that it only took him three steps to reach his bathroom.
Once in the bathroom and having turned the lock on the door, he took a quick piss, flipped the top off a Listerine bottle, poured a slug into a glass, and swished it around in his mouth to try to get rid of the sour taste. The he leaned over the sink and stared at himself in the mirror. How the black guy out there could come up with him looking like any kind of movie star in this condition was beyond Clint. He did sort of like the swarthy look of the day’s growth of beard, though, and thought maybe he’d keep that for a while. It would be classier if it was darker, of course, but he was cursed with being a natural California blond.
He reached for the bottle of Tylenol—what had he been doing that had him hung over like this?—and then reached over and turned on the shower to let the water heat up while he brushed his teeth in another effort to get rid of whatever that taste was in his mouth. It was a slightly musky taste, and that told him maybe he didn’t want to dwell on what he’d been swilling around in there.
The door rattled and there was a knock on the door.
“You takin’ a shower in there?”
“That or someone turned on Niagara Falls,” Clint called through the door.
“You let me in and I’ll shower with you. Show you more of what I can do inside you.”
“I’ll bet. I’ll just be a minute. Meantime maybe you can find the front door.”
“Ah, come on man. You were hot for it earlier. God, you were a good f***. And, come on, let me in. I gotta take a piss.”
“I’ll be just a minute.” Clint groaned. He wondered how many times they’d done it without him remembering any of it. The guy was a chunk; he didn’t mind doing it with him. He just would have liked to have been there for it.
And he wasn’t much more than a minute. As he came out of the door, holding a towel around his waist, the black guy, standing a good foot taller than Clint and a whole lot beefier, grabbed for the towel and whipped it off the smaller man.
