The abuse of a little boy turns a community against a loving gay couple, and nobody comes out of it unscathed. Sean and Austin have the perfect life: new love, a riverfront home, security. Their love for one another is only multiplied when Sean’s eight-year-old son, Jason, visits on the weekends. And then their perfect world shatters. Jason goes missing. When the boy turns up days later, he’s been so horribly abused he’s lost the power to speak. Immediately small town minds turn to the boy’s gay father and his lover as the likely culprits. What was a warm, welcoming community becomes a lynching party out for blood. As Sean and Austin struggle to stay together amidst innuendo, the very real threat of Sean losing the son he loves emerges. Yet the true villain is much closer to home, intent on ensuring the boy’s muteness is permanent.
Kimi’s thoughts:
Sean and Austin’s story unfolds with the reader becoming acquainted with just how storybook perfect their life together is. Even the fact that Sean’s son Jason is only there for weekends is marred only by the sad fact that his mother is angry and reactive towards Sean, never having forgiven him for coming out as gay and upending the life she thought she had with him. Shelley has since remarried, but that merely adds another dimension to just how imperfect her life really is- her new husband not only is homophobic, but is rather fond of drinking.
When Jason goes missing while Shelley is at work and her husband was watching him, Sean, Austin, and Shelley’s lives are turned upside down. Things go from bad to horrific when a local hermit stumbles over the boy in the woods- badly injured and unable to speak a single word. Suspicion is cast first upon the hermit who found him- Junior Parsons, then upon Sean himself. The town gossips are having a field day and the police are determined to solve the case, no matter what.
You’d think the police wanting to find the person who’d raped a child would be a good thing, but when prejudices and innuendo interfere in an already delicate situation, you get a powder keg. Sean and Austin’s relationship is torn apart, while Shelley reevaluates how she’s treated Sean, who she knows to be a good man and a doting father. If I have one complaint, it’s this: Sean loves so Austin very, very much, so why does he push him away at the very time he needs someone to lean on? I understand he’s gone off the rails, but I honestly don’t see the whole pushing away thing being so plausible in the way it unfolded here.
Otherwise, it’s a very well written drama that kept my attention, though I did guess who the evil monster was before it was revealed. That didn’t take away from the story though I did blink a bit hard over the whole guy at the river sex scenario, as it felt rather out of place and at first, I wasn’t entirely sure what had actually just happened. I will confess that reading this left me feeling raw- not just because of what happened to young Jason, but the sheer volume of unlikeable people in the book. I admit I even found Sean hard to relate to a lot of the time due to the way he suddenly distanced himself from Austin. Still, it was a good read that made me stop and think (and life is full of people we don’t like much, if at all, so ::shrug::).
Rating: 