Maloney’s Law by Anne Brooke is a gay romance and mystery. It’s also a dark, deep, and poetic gay romance and mystery.

I confess I love novels written in the first person and present tense, but I also know it’s quite difficult to write them well. But not, apparently, for Brooke. Her Maloney’s Law is exceptionally well-written.

Paul Maloney, a 30-year-old gay private investigator in London, takes on a lucrative assignment. It’s from Dominic Allen, the physically desirable and wealthy investor, with a wife and two children, who abruptly and coldly terminated his and Paul’s torrid 11-month affair three years and four months ago.

Paul is precise like that with dates and times. His idiosyncrasy also makes it easy for readers to know where they are in the story, especially in the scenes set in the past. That’s important in this novel. Paul suffered a horrifying game-changer when he was six, and he brought another one down upon himself when he was 19 and should’ve known better.

But what begins for Paul as the possible revival of an affair with the man he’s still in love with soon becomes a far more sinister matter. In that regard, I congratulate Anne Brooke for boldly creating a devastating development at the halfway mark in her novel.

Nor does Brooke wish to leave us with the contentment of a tale in which good simply wins and evil loses. In Maloney’s Law, as in life, it’s a mix. Dominic might be the bad guy, but he’s not all bad. We sympathize with Paul, but he’s clearly no saint.

The frosting on the cake of this novel is the writing. So Paul says, early on: “God alone knows what this man was ever doing with someone like me.” Later he ventures to ask: “When will I be free of it, this rock-hard certainty that, even when the book between the two of us seems closed, somehow, somewhere there’s another chapter not yet written?”

I thank you, Anne Brooke, for writing this story.

(As originally reviewed on Rainbow Book Reviews. Please visit http://www.rainbowbookreviews.com for other reviews that may be of interest.) ( )