PsyCop Property by Jordan Castillo Price

This paperback contains parts 3 and 4 in the PsyCop series. Feel free to read both reviews on this page or click a link for each review:  Psycop 3 - Body & Soul, and PsyCop 4 - Secrets.

PsyCop 3 - Body & Soul. First-person narrator Vic Bayne, 38 years old and a comically anxious guy, works in the Chicago Police Department PsyCop program which pairs psychic cops like him with non-psychics known as Stiffs. Vic is an unusually strong psychic, but he has a high-stress talent:  he's a medium who can see and speak with the dead. 

In his two previous adventures (PsyCop 1 – Among the Living, and PsyCop 2 – Criss Cross), the demands of Vic's talent drove the poor guy to reach more and more for his anti-psychic prescription Auracel (or whatever improvised equivalent came in handy).  Now in a committed relationship with smokin'-hot detective Jacob Marks (the Stiff half of another PsyCop team), Vic bravely decides to go off drugs.  Here at ObsidianBookshelf.com, I applaud his decision, recognizing its comic potential!

Chapter 1 opens on Thanksgiving Day. Vic and Jacob have driven up from Chicago to Wisconsin to eat dinner with Jacob's working-class family.  At the head of the table sits wizened old Grandma Marks who has been glaring at Vic ever since Jacob introduced him as "my boyfriend."

Young nephew Clayton eagerly wants to know if Jacob has shot anyone since last summer. Jacob's tightly-wound sister Barbara tries to keep her kid in line. The matriarch Shirley serves the traditional dinner. Her husband Jerry and her brother Leon turn on the game. They have no problem with Vic's total non-interest in football, stating (p.20), "We don't watch the Bears in this house unless they're getting their asses handed to them by the Packers."

In short, everything is normal.  Except that Vic's psychic talent allows him to see Leon's severed arm which the man lost in a mill accident in 1978! The ghostly arm still looks attached to Leon's shoulder. As Vic tries not to watch, it fingers the silverware, sweats blood, and slaps its palm on the table in robust hilarity.  At one point, it gives Vic a modest "pshaw" gesture. 

Meanwhile, the lively and opinionated family peppers Vic with questions about his job as a Psycop. They want to know all about the more interesting psychic talents that Jacob, as a Stiff, can't describe to them. Vic tries hard to hold up his end of the conversation, but soon he finds himself locked in the bathroom, plundering the family medicine cabinet for any pharmaceutical to help him through the rest of the evening – and he's not above huffing some of Shirley's nail-polish remover! Lucky for him, Jacob has some Auracel on hand.

It's a funny scene, and touching:  Vic's heartfelt attempts to "be a decent boyfriend" and cope with Jacob's family, including Uncle Leon, missing arm and all! But soon he has bigger problems to worry about.  His superior calls and summons him back to Chicago:  three people have disappeared under suspicious circumstances, including the nephew of an alderman. 

The Chicago Police Department needs Vic to return, meet his new Stiff partner, and get working on the case.  If that weren't enough right there, Jacob brings up the possibility of them looking for a house so that they can move in together.  This is a bigger deal than it would be for most people because they will need to find a place that is not haunted by any ghosts so that Vic can live there in peace.

Ordinarily, they could fall back on some long-distance help from precognitive friend Lisa, now training in California:  she could use the "si/no" (answering yes-or-no questions) to pick some good real estate for them. But, to Vic's dismay, Lisa tells him to stop taking advantage of her powers. She even cancels her cell-phone service so he can't reach her.

Now Vic has to meet his new partner Zigler:  a big slab of a guy who at first glance (p.100) "couldn't be anything other than a police officer or a football coach." To make things even more awkward, Vic is the senior partner though he suspects that Zig is probably a better cop than he is. He will have to educate Zig on how to run interference between him and all the non-psychic Police Department personnel who show up to work the crime scenes and regard psychics like Vic with deep suspicion. Even worse, he'll have to find a way to blurt out to Zig that he's not only gay, but moving in with Detective Jacob Marks. That initial I'm-gay conversation is always a nerve-wracking one!

At only 144 pages, PsyCop #3 - Body and Soul contains some wonderful comic scenes, some hot sex, and some first-rate action such as an extended chase sequence when Vic, leading a couple of uniforms, works with a whiny, disembodied voice to help track a fleeing suspect. Elsewhere, we have the welcome return of Crash, a sexy and troublesome guy who runs an occult supplies store. Crash, who once dated Jacob and who lusts after Vic, seems destined to shake up their relationship!  Once he invades Vic's thoughts, he's hard to forget.  Plus, Jacob unexpectedly offers Vic a chance to do a three-way with him and Crash as sort of "get him out of your system" plan." Oh, Jacob – bad idea!  I definitely see future complications there! 

The PsyCop series is one of my homoerotic favorites because of the pitch-perfect masculinity of the characters.  They're just realistic guys who like plenty of hot sex and have nothing Ladylike about their relationship at all. With this third installment, Body and Soul, I find myself even more looking forward to following the series in the future.  I want to know why Vic, an unlikely graduate of the Cook County Mental Health Center, decided to become a cop.  I want to hear about his parents. I'm curious about the fabled Marie Saint Savon, an even stronger medium than Vic, who could command the dead to do her bidding. I look forward to Lisa's return in subsequent adventures. And I've definitely got to know what kind of trouble Crash is going to cook up.  PsyCop 3 - Body and Soul is a terrific continuation of the PsyCop series!

PsyCop 4 - Secrets.  The story opens on a note of anxiety for first-person narrator Vic as he realizes he may have to junk many of his grungy possessions in order to move in with his boyfriend Jacob who has much more luxurious furniture. A psychic cop like Vic, who has powerful medium abilities and who sees dead people everywhere, has enough to worry about without inviting change into his life.

But he and Jacob are now the proud owners of a large brick loft apartment, converted from an old cannery, which they acquired in their third adventure, PsyCop 3 – Body and Soul.  So they draft some friends to help them move: Carolyn, Jacob's psychic partner in the PsyCops program who is a human lie detector; and bad-boy Crash, an empath who used to be Jacob's ex and currently lusts after Vic. It promises to be a day filled with interpersonal tensions.

But then Jacob and Carolyn, who work the Sex Crimes division, get called to a disturbing crime scene:  a nursing home.  Apparently an invisible assailant is sexually assaulting an elderly, psychic lady who lives there.  No one can figure out how to track down the criminal. 

Meanwhile Vic has problems of his own that go beyond just fending off Crash for whom he feels a complicated mix of attraction and revulsion. His thoughts have drifted back to Camp Hell, a brutal and secret institution at which he was once an inmate. Supposedly Camp Hell functioned as a training facility for psychics like him, but he remembers it more as a laboratory in which he got experimented on.  Consequently his psychic skills are self-taught and unstable.

Vic goes online only to find out that Camp Hell and its graduates are apparently so classified that they have no records at all.  His own identity doesn't exist. This gives him the spooky intuition that big covert forces, possibly related to the government, are at work in his destiny.  He also has a feeling that Jacob knows more than he's telling.

But he can't ask Jacob who is becoming obsessed with solving the ongoing sexual assaults at the nursing home.  Jacob works long hours on the case and seems distant and preoccupied when at home.  Imagine Vic's dismay when he finds out that Jacob is confiding the details of his case to Crash in a misguided attempt to keep from bringing his work home!

Just when it seems that Vic has no sidekick for this new adventure, we get the welcome return of Lisa Gutierrez, the psychic cop he met in PsyCop 1 – Among the Living, who was missing in action during PsyCop 2 and 3 as she honed her psychic skills in a much nicer training facility than Camp Hell.  Lisa calls Vic  from the Chicago airport in tears.  She has just flown in from California to seek his guidance in her ongoing struggle with her particular psychic talent.

Lisa is a precognitive who calls her talent "si-no" (Spanish for yes-no) because she can predict the future through yes-or-no questions. But she's having trouble setting boundaries on her talent: she always ends up either running herself into the ground, or letting others do this to her, through overwork.  This will become a problem as Jacob – frantic to solve the nursing home crime – tries to exploit Lisa's talent with no regard for her limits.

PsyCop 4 – Secrets is aptly named as the main characters struggle with secrets that they are keeping from each other and puzzles that they are trying to figure out. The character interactions are as sharply drawn and funny as always and the nursing home mystery provides several suspenseful and action-filled scenes.  My one reservation here at ObsidianBookshelf.com concerns the cliff-hanger ending which fades out mid-scene.  However, this is a strong entry into the PsyCop series, and it introduces an intriguing story arc involving Vic's classified past to be explored in the future. 
Links:

• Buy PsyCop Property (Parts 3 and 4) at Amazon.com:  PsyCop: Property
• Buy Secrets as an ebook at JCP Books.
• Click here for more Jordan Castillo Price (author page/bibliography)
• I don't allow my reviews to be copied in full. Please click here to see how to use an excerpt / blurb.
• Go to the list of all m/m reviews
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