Review - The Hardest Thing

This review was written for BDSM Book Reviews and originally appeared there.

Dan Stagg was a career marine in the era of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. When a sniper in Helmond kills his lover, the major loses it. His superior officers ask, and Dan tells, and that’s the end of his military career. As a civilian with a less than honorable discharge, the only work he can find is as a doorman at a club in the East Village of New York. Unfortunately, even that job comes to an end when he uses a little more force than deemed necessary on a surly patron trying to force his way into the club.

Dan’s job prospects are looking decidedly bleak, so when a slick businessman shows up at his door offering a hefty fee for the marine to get the ‘secretary’ of his boss out of New York and keep him safe, Dan doesn’t ask too many questions, which of course he later regrets. The secretary turns out to be a young twink named Stirling and it’s very clear that his employer doesn’t keep him around for his typing skills. While Stirling plays the entitled rich kid very well at first, it soon becomes clear that he isn’t what he seems. Finding out who the young man really is is just part of the mystery that Major Dan Stagg has to unravel if he’s going to keep them both alive.

The author of “The Hardest Thing”, James Lear, is a popular British writer of gay fiction. Like most of his previous stories, this book is primarily a mystery, punctuated by several raunchy sex scenes. Unlike his previous books, which were all set in the past, “The Hardest Thing” is set in the near present-day. As a mystery, this isn’t really a “whodunit”, since the bad guys are pretty obvious, even to the main characters. The challenge is more about Dan figuring out who he can trust, and how to get out of the situation he’s gotten himself in while making the bad guys pay for getting him in this mess.

While there is a lot of sex in “The Hardest Thing”, it’s not really all that kinky. As an ex-marine major, Dan certainly has a dominant streak, and for that matter Stirling definitely enjoys taking the submissive role in sex, but there’s very little real D/s action going on here. There is a surprising and deftly handled role reversal for Dan late in the book, but in reality the kinkiest thing that happens is a sort of four-way in a gas station bathroom.

Although the story really doesn’t work as a BDSM novel, it certainly delivers a great read on all other fronts. It’s just the kind of tale you would expect from Lear, albeit in an entirely different setting. The ending is a little bit uncertain, but given that the full title of the book is “A Dan Stagg Mystery” it would appear that we’re in for another volume in which we’ll probably find out how things work out for our hero.

“The Hardest Thing” is available from Amazon.