REVIEW: The Assignment by Evangeline Anderson

Man Love. My first. Maybe my last. I just know that I couldn’t have a sur­feit of these types of books on a daily basis. Or any erot­ica that’s m/m,m/f, f/f or whatever. If it enter­tains, I’ll read it but erot­ica these days, compose very little of my read­ing diet. Moving on. I bought this book because the buzz sur­round­ing it has been pretty pos­i­tive. Here is the descrip­tion for your perusal:

Detec­tive Nico­las Valenti has never had feel­ings for a man that go beyond friend­ship. But now he’s in love with his part­ner Sean O’Brien. There’s just one problem–Sean is straight. Isn’t he?

The Assign­ment was just aver­age for this reader. I had some seri­ous issues with Valenti’s part­ner, Sean O’Brien, claim­ing his het­ero­sex­u­al­ity while he was under­cover with Nicholas. The problem? I just didn’t believe it. See, the Assign­ment requires the two men to work under­cover together and pre­tend to be lovers in order for them to take down a dan­ger­ous crim­i­nal who hap­pens to fre­quent gay clubs, bars or what­ever. The prob­lem arises when Nicholas Valenti starts having some real, seri­ous feel­ings for his part­ner, Sean. I really liked Nicholas and I could under­stand his feelings for Sean since they’d been friends for years and were close. Thus, I had no prob­lem with his char­ac­ter or the way he was writ­ten. I felt sorry for him and I wanted him to have his happy ending.

The biggest prob­lem of this story for me was the way Sean O’Brian’s character was written.  The author wants the reader to believe Sean’s sexual exploration was noth­ing for him to think about twice. He did all the kiss­ing, grop­ing, feely stuff with another guy that would make one think twice that he was straight. However, we see Nicholas really grap­pling with his sex­u­al­ity and his feelings while  we see Sean  all out flaming. Rather than be per­ceived as a full blooded het­ero­sex­ual male as the author would like the reader to do,  Sean comes across as a man who lived his life in the closet and was finally let loose. I would never believe that he was straight. Never. Sorry. Just couldn’t. As the enve­lope was pushed fur­ther and fur­ther, Sean’s response was always: it’s ok, it’s for the job. Yeah, right. Tell that to some­one else. I just accepted that Nicholas fell in love with Sean but never thought him­self as gay. Sean just acted gay from the start. 

All in all, this book was about aver­age for me, C. Take heart. Others did enjoy it. I just didn’t think it was all that great. It wasn’t all bad. I liked the writ­ing. The story was some­what entertaining. Characterizations were decent. The author’s voice has a nice flow to it. Would I read any­thing else by her? Prob­a­bly not.

Tagged as: Evangeline Anderson, mxm romance, Romantica