Once again, digging through the library as I continue towards shelving everything finally, and found Gary Zebrun's Someone You Know in a box. I have no idea when I acquired this, as it has no price tag, no scratched out library stickers, etc. Looked at the dust cover synopsis and decided "Why Not?"
Which may have been a mistake, since the first half dovetailed with my personal issues in unexpected ways.
Anyway, We're following middle aged Daniel Caruso, a newspaper feature columnist (Think Dave Barry or Erma Bombeck), who is married with an 18 year old daughter. As we open, he's in Seattle for a news paper conference, and cruising a local S&M bar looking for penis. He picks up a firefighter, who takes him home. Daniel leaves Seattle for his home in Providence the next morning (Good Friday), and as he's waiting in O'Hare for a connection, he hooks up with a guy in a bathroom stall. After finishing, he finds someone has slipped a bottle of pills he found at the firefighter's house under the stall door.
Seems ol' Daniel has an oddball stalker, one who kills every one of Daniel's tricks an hour or so after he finishes.
I think we end up with 6 dead bodies with a condom attached to their chest by the end, which is Easter Monday. Admittedly, one of those is a person Daniel only kisses, but still... And to make matters worse, the stalker is emailing Daniel, sending souvenirs, and involving Daniel's family in the game.
Given it's only about 200 pages, I can't get into too much detail abut everything that happens, but...
On one hand, the book is engaging, and Daniel's spiral is very well portrayed. On the other hand, we're again dealing with situations where Daniel should have been shooting dust or comatose from over exertion in the overly tight timeline we're given. That Daniel also travels quite a bit, winding up in New York City on Easter, the suspension of disbelief starts flying out the window after reading it. Mind you, the other problem was that I was pretty sure the identity of the stalker after about 50 pages, was correct, then tried to figure out how said stalker managed to avoid being seen in areas where Daniel would have recognized a familiar face in a strange place.
I mean, like I said, it held my attention, but the engagement ended not long after the final page and the last bit of trying to insert Jesus into the narrative.
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