A Wedding to Die For - A Brandt and Donnelly Caper, Case File Number Three

Officers Brandt and Donnelly return for their third "caper," and this time, their success in quelling the bigotry in Woodley has opened the door for the two police officers to head up a new task force that will help see to it that the state's new gay marriage law (this book was published back in 2014) is adhered to by the numerous hometown businesses who don't want to recognize and honor it.  And, as fate would have it, their very first case involves a Romeo and Juliet scenario - albeit with a gay twist!

A Wedding to Die For is definitely the best of the Brandt/Donnelly novels so far, at least when it comes to the mystery plot.  A prominent gay couple (one a newscaster, one an attorney) are planning their wedding - but when they are turned away by the baker and the florist they want for their wedding, they fight back.  Enter Brandt and Donnelly.  The two police officers, as a part of their new duties on the task force, pay a visit to the florist, and then the baker, to convince them to revisit their discriminatory actions against the gay couple.  The florist and the baker are both resistant, but ultimately they give in (due to the number of order cancellations based on the public outrage after the couple went public with the issue), allowing their sons to take over the jobs for the wedding.  Their sons, who, coincidentally enough, are both gay.  And, who coincidentally enough, happen to not only know each other, but share a secret from their past that turns out to have some very deadly consequences in the present.

Author Xavier Mayne provides a well-written tale of revenge, star-crossed love, and flat-out hate-filled bigotry.  Someone wants to turn the wedding into a disaster.  And a disaster it becomes when nearly everyone at the reception becomes violently ill, forcing Brandt and Donnelly to act quickly and get them the medical attention they need.  They immediately begin an investigation into the source of the mass-poison, and then into the culprit behind it.  When one of the two grooms winds up dead on his honeymoon, it becomes a murder investigation.

Was it the baker or the florist determined to seek revenge on having been forced to offer their services to the gay couple?  Or was it one of their sons, who may not be everything he's pretending to be?  Or was it someone completely off the radar, with intentions Brandt and Donnelly can't even begin to understand?  And what of Justin and Roman, the baker's and florist's sons?  Is their romance doomed before it even begins?

Mayne has got a great hold on the characters, and even the ever-flamboyant Bryce makes a few brief appearances that are so over-the-top, yet everyone knows someone just like him.  The growing rapport between Brandt and Donnelly, now that they are engaged (that happened at the end of the second book - where have you been?), flows naturally, and it's nice to see them getting to become more comfortable with each other and with themselves, particularly as they begin planning their own wedding.

My only problem with this book (and the previous two) are the gratuitous, overly-explicit sexual encounters - between Brandt and Donnelly and between Justin and Roman.  I realize that there is a market for erotica, and I'm by no means a prude.  But (and this is just for me!), when I'm reading a mystery, particularly a really good mystery like this one, explicit sex scenes such as the ones here pull me out of the story.  To me, those scenes have absolutely no bearing on the mystery, and, in fact, the romance between the couples would have been more intimate had the explicit nature of those scenes been toned down.

Not sure that I will be picking up any further books in this series, regardless of how much I enjoy the mystery part and I like the characters.  Guess we will just have to see what the future holds...

RATING:  6 stacks of blueberry pancakes with a side of bacon out of 10 for taking a Shakespearean tragedy and turning it into a good little mystery.

Wrestling Demons - A Brandt and Donnelly Caper, Case File Number Two

Okay, I decided to give this series a second chance and picked up the second book, hoping beyond hope that the author had toned down the graphic nature of his writing after that first so-called "mystery" story. I admittedly liked the characterization of Officers Brandt and Donnelly, so there is a part of me that was wanting to find a way to continue with the series - but I firmly decided if the graphic sex depicted in the first book inundated the second book just as much, then that would end it for me.

Thankfully, this was not the case!

Author Xaiver Mayne addresses something I believe to be an important topic in Wrestling Demons - the fact that sports stars are oft-times protected when they commit crimes, while others who perpetrate the same crimes are prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.  In this second case file, Officers Brandt and Donnelly are called to the Mayberry-type town of Woodley to assist the police chief there with a sensitive case.  It seems someone has made public a video tape taken in the boys' locker room, showing embarrassing images of the wrestling team, particularly the star wrestler, Jonah Fischer.  While the video goes no further than showing Jonah's backside, the police chief and the worn are worried that because the video has gone viral, it will put unneeded pressure on the team, and particularly on Jonah, before the upcoming finals.  Brandt and Donnelly agree to look into the matter, despite the clear feelings of the police chief (and the rest of the town for that matter) that the video is being used by "perverts" (a/k/a gays).

Mayne takes some interesting twists and turns throughout the book, as the two officers try to uncover the truth.  A second video placed Jonah in a very precarious position (as it not only shows full frontal of the eighteen year old, but it outs him as being attracted to one of his fellow players, who also happens to be his best friend!), and the town is outraged!  Brandt and Donnelly have a difficult time, since they are a gay couple, dealing with a homophobic town - but Jason is fortunate that is friend does not condemn his homosexuality, but instead, agrees to help him through it.

Things go from bad to worse for Jason, as his chances for a wrestling scholarship are taken away from him, and a third video that goes viral shocks everyone!  Brandt and Donnelly have to work overtime to put an end to this, as the town is getting ready for a mob lynching.  There's a huge surprise, however, when the town holds a meeting to address the situation - and when Brandt and Donnelly find an unexpected connection between these videos and the video of a young girl having sex with two high school boys that shamed the girl and drove her and her mother out of town several years back, they make it their mission to not only protect Jonah and his best friend, but to show the town of Woodley that it's time to come out of the '50s!

The story is actually very touching and definitely relevant to today's world (where people place sports stars above the law and victimize them when they are the perpetrators of crimes), and the growth and changes in Jonah's relationship with his best friend is really enjoyable to read.

NOW - that being said, Mayne still manages to throw in a couple of somewhat explicit sex scenes; however, they are toned down compared to the ones in the first book, and there are nowhere near as many, thankfully.  I am definitely more about the mystery and story, and Mayne definitely delivers that in this second case file - enough that I'll be search for the third book so I can see what happens to Brandt and Donnelly next (although the end of this book gives a very strong hint at what's to come).

RATING:  6 platters of half-baked scones out of 10 for providing a great mystery with a touching coming out tale that wasn't over-splattered with graphic sex.

Frat House Troopers - A Brandt and Donnelly Caper, Case File Number One

So, what do you do when you're a cop, you're straight, and you're asked to go undercover - as a male model on one of those "frat boys" website for gay viewers? That is question Officer Ethan Brandt has to ask himself when his superiors tell him he's going undercover - Brandt just never expected that undercover would turn into "under the covers"!

Xavier Mayne's first book in the Brandt and Donnelly Caper series not only introduces his two protagonists, Officer Ethan Brandt and his partner (work-wise) Officer Gabriel Donnelly, but introduces readers to a whole world of unique characters - such as Donnelly's sister, Chris; a fellow officer, Jimmy Walters; the flamboyant clothing store employee, Bryce, and his co-worker, Nestor; and a house full of frat boys and their too-good-to-be-true boss, Drake. Set in a non-specific state, Mayne (a pseudonym for an English professor at a university in the Midwest) gives readers an interesting premise - Brandt is sent undercover to get the goods (so to speak) on this online porn site, as the Attorney General wants to see the house shut down for good, utilizing tax evasion as the means to doing it.

I bought Frat House Troopers based upon the plot described on Amazon, thinking this might be another great detective / mystery series with a gay protagonist (yes, no big spoiler there - Brandt and Donnelly may claim to be straight in the beginning of the story, but it's quickly apparent that they are both closeted, and it takes this undercover mission to bring them both out and into each other's arms). The opening chapters even gave me some hope that this could be a great mystery - the characters are interesting, the dialogue natural, and the camaraderie between Brandt and Donnelly felt very real.  And while I'm not a huge fan of the romance genre, I admit to hoping the spark between the two men would eventually ignite into a relationship for them.

Sadly, though, once Brandt gets to the frat house, Mayne devolves into what most writers of gay stories seem to do - he starts pushing the explicit sex scenes.  Had there just been one, done tastefully, I might have been able to overlook it.  Had there been maybe just two scenes, I might have skimmed over them and kept going.  Instead, Mayne seems to have felt at that point that the only way he could keep readers interested was to have it one scene after another, with just a bit of story in between each scene.  While the first scene at the house might have had some actual import in the story, since Brandt was going undercover for purposes of setting up a sting to close the shop down, many of the other scenes were unnecessary (at least, there was absolutely no need for the explicit nature of the scenes) and added nothing to the story.

To make it even more sad, Mayne provided a great mystery, and he went in a completely different direction than I was expecting with the resolution - I certainly did not see that coming!  The man definitely knows how to throw in a twist that not only gives readers a surprise, but a very satisfying solution to the mystery.  His writing is really good, he can plot the heck out of a story, so why burden it down with the unnecessary explicitness of scenes that do not add anything other than "sex sells" to the book?

I will likely give the second book a chance in the hopes that Mayne tones it down a bit and starts to focus more on the mystery and the story itself - but if the second book has the same or even more scenes like this one, there will be no more on my shelves.

RATING:  3 Closet Busters out of 10 for throwing in that surprise twist at the end, which is the only thing that saved this book from being a total failure