As a starter for a new series, this is a pretty good story. Joe is a very likeable character even before you side with him after seeing the 'love' he gets from his neighbours. You know all those 'love thy neighbour', 'turn the other cheek' and all that? Well, Joe is the epitome of those values. While he doesn't exactly turn the other cheek, he is more than a decent person and a better man than most of those people around him.For some reason I expected this to be a mystery story with some romance thrown into the mix. It isn't. This book is a great bait. Now, I want to know what happens with Joe and Kabe. And I hope Joe never loses his humorous side. Some minor spoilers and some personal talk ahead, so be warned.I'm just going to be upfront about this: I have extremely complicated and mixed feelings about this book. I was raised Mormon, so that's always going to color my views and interpretations of characters who are also Mormon. I also have very complicated and mixed feelings when it comes to my church (though not my faith), so that also factors into all this. I'm also extremely tired of the "bigoted religious people" trope that's used way too often in MM. Need a character who hates the gays? Make them ultra conservative religious! *yawn* It's boring, it's cliched, it's annoying. Stop it, writers. Or at least, balance it out with some open-minded conservative religious characters, because you know what? They exist too.And that is ultimately what this book does. Joe is, in many ways, my alter ego. If I were a deputy and could rock climb. ;) I connected with Joe in a way I've never connected with another character before. It was like, finally, here's a character I can understand inside and out (or very nearly understand, I'll get to that in a minute), who shares my views and my hopes and disappointments with my church, who can be both true to his faith and himself at the same time. Yes, he meets resistance with the bishop, who is not a mustache-twirling villain but who actually thinks he's trying to help Joe in the way the church ordains it. He also meets with support and affirmation. So I liked all that. Actually, I loved all that.I also liked the murder mystery. It's pretty standard as far as murder mysteries go, but the location makes it unique and you can tell the author either did an extreme amount of research or has lived in the area and participated in rock climbing himself. It's authentic and genuine, and the locales and characters we meet along the way just jump off the page. It's very rare for an author to do that.Sadly, he lost me with the BDSM. I'm not going to say there's no such thing as a Mormon who practices BDSM, because if there's one thing I've learned about this world it's that anything is possible. However, I was raised that you treat your body as a temple, as you do your partner. You value it, you do not tie it up and whip it or beat it up. It felt very jarring and out of place every time one of those scenes came up and I found myself skipping a lot of this book and finding it harder to continue on with these characters and this relationship. It was extremely uncomfortable for me, and I ended up loathing Joe and wondering why Kabe would put up with him. So, there it is. I loved so much about this book, but the BDSM ruined it for me. Without that, I would've gobbled up these books in a week and hailed Deputy Joe as the greatest character ever. But since I've been warned the BDSM continues into the following books and gets more graphic still, I will not be continuing this series, as much as it saddens me to say that. It was like finding a long-lost best friend just to wake up and find out it was a dream. :(
What do You think about Hard Fall (2009)?
I'm not going to rate this. Joe's dialect continues to throw me out of the story.
—gohan
This book was read and reviewed by Love Bytes Reviews.
—fuifui
