Review: The Man Who Lost His Pen (Ben Ames Files #2) by Gayleen Froese
Calgary PI Ben Ames expects a relaxing evening off as he supports his boyfriend, Jesse, one of the star performers at a charity concert. But it turns out relaxing isn’t on the program. When last-minute guest Matt Garrett shows up, it creates a frenzy backstage. An A-list movie star with an ego to match, Garrett has bad blood with many of the performers—Jesse included. So when Garrett turns up dead, Ben begins to dig for the truth, both to protect Jesse and to satisfy his own instinctive curiosity. So much for his night off. When the police arrive, emotions backstage heat up, but no one can step out to cool off, because the Western Canadian winter is so cold that hypothermia waits outside. With such a high-profile crime, the lead detective seems poised to make a quick arrest… and Jesse’s a prime suspect. Ben has his work cut out for him to solve the murder under the police and paparazzi’s noses before Jesse’s reputation becomes collateral damage.
Review:
Dear Gayleen Froese,
This is the book two in the Ben Ames Case Files m/m romantic mystery series. I really enjoyed the first book and grabbed this one as well. Both books were on KU and I already preordered the third one (not on KU).
I believe that six months passed after the first book. Jesse and Ben reconnected in the first book under somewhat dramatic circumstances and here we see them together working on their relationship and of course Ben gets a chance to investigate another murder. Only this time the murder hits closer to home to both of them. As the blurb states Ben accompanied Jesse to a charity concert and one of the supposed performers there who comes at the last minute, ends up dead and Jesse is one of the prime suspects.
I have to say that despite reading the blurb carefully, the story surprised me somewhat. Yes, it is clear that a celebrity gets killed, but I did not expect that Ben’s investigation (according to my calculations anyway) lasted about 24 hours or maybe even less. This ended up essentially being a closed room (or is the expression a “closed door”?) mystery. We have a limited amount of people as performers on the upcoming show for charity and some of them (not even all of them!) end up being suspects.
I liked that author did not repeat the structure of the first book and the characters even make a joke about that.
“I sure hope someone else here is moonlighting as a world-class private detective,” I said, “because that’s not me.” “You solved a whodunnit last year.” “No, I solved a keep-chipping-away-at-it last year. I ran down leads until there were no more. I have no experience with this Murder on the Orient Express business.” “Oh, we should have all killed him together!” Luna said. “Why didn’t we think of it?”
The structure of the story is interesting. I think the murder is taking place and discovered in chapter eight, and the book has twenty five chapters with the epilogue. So a third of the story at least we watch various characters, who are about to perform at this ensemble show for charity, interacting. With some of them Jess has a previous history, with some – not really. I will be honest that besides letting us see more Ben and Jesse together, I was not really sure what was the point of those chapters and all the new characters. I mean, my thought was that they all will be suspects later on, but they were not!
There were only four viable suspects (one more person looks like a possible suspect for a short period of time, but is discarded as a suspect pretty fast), and one of them is Jess and once again, no offense to the author, but despite Jess having a pretty good motive, I was really REALLY sure that he could not have done it. I was sure because of the meta reasons of course – one half of the main romantic couple is a murderer? Unless Ben planned to run away with him from the justice system, I would say no and Ben really did not sound like a guy to do that.
So why all the other people were there I was not sure. I mean some of them ended up helping in the investigation a little bit, but I cannot say that I cared much about them one way or another even when the story ended. Maybe the author plans on bringing at least some of these people back and develop them further in the next book? That would have been awesome.
Having said all that, I still enjoyed this story a lot, a whole lot I would say. I still think that Ben and Jesse have great chemistry and I really enjoyed seeing them both on page. You could see that not all angles are smoothed between them after the break up that lasted seven years, but I could also see that they both really love each other and want to stay together and hopefully make it work.
I have no frame of reference of what it means to date a celebrity of any kind, but somehow Ben’s reactions also made sense to me (genuine love and support, but also irritation about some negative aspects of his job that may take some toll on Jesse).
I was actually quite amused about how Ben tried really hard to do a balancing act about catching a murderer because he was hired (not by Jesse thank goodness) to find the real murderer and kept telling himself that Jesse could not have done it for Reasons even if many things could point at him actually doing the murderer.
I also liked that even if Ben had his eyes on the real murderer as a real suspect several times during his short but eventually very effective investigation, he kept trying to look into everything, into other people, into all the motives, in other words he tried to be thorough. I just thought that he once again was a pretty decent investigator, his inexperience (according to him) with closed door mysteries notwithstanding :)
Grade: B/B+
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Thanks for the review!
Thank you.