Maloney's Law by Anne Brooke

Maloney's Law opens poignantly as our first-person narrator meets his ex-lover. Paul Maloney is a 31 year-old private investigator and Dominic Allen is a ruthless business tycoon.  They meet after dark in a bad part of London: specifically, an abandoned building used as a gay cruising spot. Dominic, who is married with children, outlines the case:  he wants Paul to investigate the possibly shady dealings of an IT company he might acquire.

Will Paul take Dominic's case? While he's considering it, a car drives past and illuminates them in its headlights.  To protect Dominic from possibly being recognized, Paul kisses him, hiding his face. The car moves on.  Dominic wipes off the kiss, and tears come to Paul's eyes.  Is it wise to choose to work for a man with whom Paul is clearly still obsessed?  Probably not, but the obsessed are seldom strong enough to make the right choice.

Paul takes the case to the dismay of his best friend Jade, a vivid supporting character. A beautiful woman with a fondness for flashy earrings and flowery perfume, Jade is Paul's assistant and expert computer-hacker.  She helps him book a brief trip to Cairo, Egypt to investigate the headquarters of the sinister Delta Egypt Group. Paul is ready for anything:  a meeting with a hostile CEO, an attack in a crowded marketplace, and even some nocturnal breaking-and-entering which leads to corporate espionage.

This is fun stuff. However, once Paul returns to the UK on page 38, the story subtly shifts from action-adventure to a more introspective emphasis on Paul's development as a character. We learn that he's the son of wealthy and socially prominent parents who have distanced themselves from him and his gay "lifestyle." This mutual estrangement has its roots in the family's central tragedy:  the kidnapping of his sister Teresa when he was six and she was nine.  The favored child, Teresa was never seen again. Subsequently, Paul became a private investigator.

Paul's investigation into Delta Egypt Group does continue as he develops a personal reason to solve the case.  But it recedes into the background as other scenes take over that delineate the increasingly rocky emotional terrain that Paul must navigate: flashbacks to his past (to Teresa and to his affair with Dominic); interactions with Jade and her parents; and painful exchanges with his own family.  Gradually one realizes that Maloney's Law doesn't contain enough action for a thriller or enough puzzles for a mystery. It's really more the story of a man evolving past an obsession, and -- just for the record -- contains only a few brief, minimal sex scenes.

Paul's story is gracefully written as I've come to expect here at Obsidianbookshelf.com from this talented author.  He's also a likeable, vulnerable character with a problem.  But in the end, I'm left thinking that there is nothing all that remarkable about his story that distinguishes it from many others that center on obsessive love.  This is a heavily-mined theme and it's grown increasingly hard to grab the readers with a truly original story along these lines. In the long run, I'd tend to direct you away from Maloney's Law, and towards an earlier novel by the author that ventures into darker aspects of obsessive love: A Dangerous Man.  But that's just my opinion. Feel free to check out Maloney's Law and decide for yourselves. 
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