Lee James

Dreamspinner Press publishes mid-range gay-themed fiction. I have read a handful of their offerings and I am not overly impressed with the quality of their editorial staff. An editor's job is one of tough love, pushing authors hard to improve their work. Dreamspinner seems more interested in getting books on the street as fast as possible than in requiring the additional polishing that would raise manuscript quality.

"Icarus Ascending", despite its ludicrous title, is a moderately successful mystery story set in the Los Angeles music business. The Hunter brothers are successful musicians and their mother runs a company that manages entertainers and others. Late last year Brent Hunter was killed in a plane crash, but the family secret (we learn this early so this isn't a spoiler) is that Brent isn't dead. He is in hiding. Brent planned the disappearance to boost his sales. Someone else engineered the plane crash to kill him. Brent is now hiding for his life.

Our hero, Kirk MacGregor, is a multi-talented guy who works as an in-house investigator for his father's highly successful law firm. Kirk is handsome and wealthy and smart. He has a team of people working for him and together they handle a range of cases for the MacGregor firm. The Hunter family, acting somewhat duplicitously, asks Kirk to investigate Brent's activities leading up to his disappearance because they fear he was murdered. Shortly thereafter a vicious hired killer begins murdering people in the Hunter circle on the orders of a hidden mastermind.

The themes and plot of the book are good, but the execution could have been much better.

Mr. James is a lawyer but ignores completely the legal implications of Brent's fraudulent death. Legal fallout is not central to the plot, but lots of things would have happened in the six months between the crash and the opening of this book and Brent and the Hunter family would be in a world of trouble, none of which is mentioned. Insurance fraud, breach of contract with labels and distributers, making false statements to the police, the list goes on. In California entertainers do get in trouble and rich ones especially and including some of this in the story would have made it more realistic.

I don't hang out in top-tier LA law firms but the behavior and language used by Tony, the firm's administrator, seems likely to offend clients. So he either would have had to cultivate multiple personas, which seems dishonest, or he would not behave as he is presented.

My main complaint, though, is that while I like not being able to guess the identity of the murderer, here I had to search the text because I did not remember the murderer at all. It's not quite as if the barista from Chapter 1 did it, but the murderer is almost that obscure. The link between the murderer and the hired killer is not something the reader could have known. A bit more development would have helped immensely.

I received a review copy of "Icarus Ascending" by Lee James (Dreamspinner) through NetGalley.com.… (mehr)