“The Hardest Thing: A Dan Stagg Mystery” is an erotic mystery novel featuring a lot of gay sex. A paperback novel and published by Cleis Press, this book has 256 pages. The back and front cover look discreet enough to easily pass as a standard mystery romance novel, so this could be read in public pretty easily. The book is split into relatively-large chapter segments, so if you like to quit between chapters, you should be prepared to sit down a bit longer.
The novel focuses on Dan Stagg – a Marine who was kicked out of the military after disclosing his gay status to his superiors following an incident. Finding himself out of work after his nightclub bouncer job falls through, Dan Stagg takes the next job opportunity that comes his way – protecting the young male “secretary” of a powerful real estate broker. Finding the secretary annoying – but hot as all get-out – Dan quickly finds that the young man’s idea of protection includes more than just being his bodyguard. The novel follows their journey to escape to freedom – and as the novel progresses, Dan quickly realizes that something strange is going on. Who is really after the two of them?
Depending on what type of sex you like to read about, you might find yourself a bit, well, surprised by this novel. There are a couple scenes that could easily be classified as rape. However, all of the sex scenes do seem believable to the plot when you take into account that the main character is a gay male with a huge libido. There’s even a point where the character walks away from an unfolding sex scene because it wouldn’t make story sense for him to stick around.
That being said, there is a decent amount of sex or sexual alluding throughout this book. The main character (Dan Stagg) seems to regularly have sex on his mind, and even throughout regular dialogue, he’ll interject notes about how fuckable he thinks characters are or things he wants to do to them. Dan seems to take most available sexual opportunities and capitalizes on them. However, none of it seems outside of the storyline. It seems to fit into his personality, but it’s just lucky he seems to be regularly-surrounded by open-to-male-on-male experiences people.
As for the story itself, I’d say that it shares the center stage with the sexual aspects of the book. Both seem to take equal importance. You’ll get to enjoy a thoughout, well-written plot while also getting the sex scenes in there. The plot isn’t quite as convoluted as some mystery novels, but it’s still definitely a nice surprise-type plot. There aren’t too many huge surprises, but it’s an enjoyable read.
I was a bit frustrated by the ending, though. I don’t want to spoil any of it, but I’ll say that I think it was relatively reckless and out of character for the former Marine. However, it did wrap up the story nicely with a relatively happy ending – which I’m sure is how most people prefer their erotica – so for that aspect, it worked out well.
The writing was enjoyable as well. It never felt like James Lear was too jilted or broken. The writing flowed well, and I never felt like I had too many or two few details. Good middle ground. The sex scenes probably could have been drawn out a bit more, but they were quite enjoyable for what they were, and each one had enough variance in the actual length and content of sex (oral, group, receiving, penetrating, etc.) to feel unique from the sex scene that came before it.
Overall, “The Hardest Thing: A Dan Stagg Mystery” was a particularly good read. It ends up being a book that doesn’t leave the sex scenes out – no fade to black when characters get intimate. Instead, it has nice, flushed out sex scenes partnered by a realistic story that you could easily find in mainstream mystery novels. If you loveyour reading with a bit of enjoyably readable sex scenes, “The Hardest Thing” is going to be right up your alley. Thanks to Cleis Press for providing this gay erotica mystery novel for The Hardest Thing book review.
