Review: Faith & Fidelity

Title: Faith & Fidelity
Series: Faith, Love & Devotion
Author: Tere Michaels
Publisher: Loose Id
Publication Date: 23 September 2008
Reviewed Format: ebook
Length: 229 pages

Rating: 2 out of 5

Blurb:
New York City Vice Detective Evan Cerelli has lost his wife, the only person he ever loved and slept with. He's trying to get on with his life, build a life for his children. Former Homicide Detective Matt Haight is a ladies' man, all sex/no commitment. He's depressed, having a midlife crisis, and not sure where his life is headed.

The two find friendship in the bottom of a shared bottle. When the friendship turns to love, it shakes two straight men to the core and flips their lives inside out. Kids, families, careers that are not gay-friendly -- can all the love in the world overcome the obstacles to faith and fidelity?

Review:

Main Characters:
Evan is an officer with the NYPD, working in Vice. He lost his wife, Sherri, to an accident, and has been struggling since then to pull himself together to raise their four children. He's never had romantic thoughts about anyone but his wife--much less another man--and doesn't know what to make of it when attraction blooms between him and Matt. He's a mire of doubt and self-flagellation, and doesn't know how to go about helping himself. I found him hard to relate to; although his grief was palpable and well-done, it was also almost entirely who he was for the vast majority of the story.

Matt is a former Homicide detective, drummed out of the force after taking down a crooked cop and working now in private security. He's on a downward slide; he's alone and lonely, and the drinking he uses to cope with his life is beginning to take its toll. Although he does cut a rather pathetic figure, at least in the beginning, I found him much easier to invest in. I wouldn't say necessarily that I like him, but I at least didn't want to shake him as often as I did Evan.

Chemistry:
Evan and Matt begin as friends, bonding over each having lost their purpose for living--Evan lost Sherri, while Matt lost his position with the NYPD. It develops fairly quickly into attraction on Matt's part, lingers as one-sided for a short while, then bursts into a shared passion during a night of comfort. I wish the friendship had lingered longer, actually, as once they both recognized and acknowledged the attraction, things moved very quickly, almost too much so for my tastes.

Although they are attracted to each other, there is not a lot of sexual contact in this book; it focuses more on their growth as a couple, rather than their heat between the sheets. In fact, they never actually have penetrative sex. Handjobs, blowjobs, and frottage all make an appearance, but they never actually have intercourse. It's a surprising change, and actually rather refreshing. That being said: some of the situations in which they have sex throw me. The downstairs couch plays a big part in many of their sexual encounters, sometimes when the kids are asleep upstairs. If I were them, I'd be constantly on edge, waiting for someone to come downstairs (as kids are wont to do) and catch me in a compromising situation. I just couldn't believe that a man who cared so much about his children would leave such a chance open.

Secondary Characters:
There is a large supporting cast, mostly on Evan's side. Although large, they're never quite overwhelming and mostly well-drawn, though the motivations of some are questionable. (Sherri's parents elude and frustrate me. They apparently blame Evan for not only killing Sherri, but for taking her away in the first place. Don't people usually leave their parents' home when they marry? Why bear such a large grudge that they actually try to keep his children from him? It doesn't make sense.) The kids were the high points, although I also rather liked Vic and Helena.

Story:
The bulk of the story is Evan working through his grief. There is a lot of dwelling upon Sherri and their life together. A lot. Things come to a head after Evan is injured in the line of duty, leaving Evan and Matt to deal with the fallout of Evan's latest crisis. The events are a logical, appealing progression, but the pacing is frequently dragged down by the focus on Evan's all-consuming grief.

There doesn't really seem to be a whole lot of closure in this story. There are a number of threads left loose, and the ending is rather abrupt. The third book in the series apparently revisits Evan and Matt, which hopefully means that those issues left unaddressed with be resolved, but at least a little more tidying up at the end of this book couldn't have hurt.

Writing:
The writing was perhaps the weakest point of the book. There are frequent errors--typos, grammatical errors, word substitutions or misspellings, even a couple of what appear to be Find and Replace errors. The author had trouble keeping straight some facts, ages in particular. (Miranda is 16 or 17 depending on the scene. Sherri is 34 when she dies and apparently the same age as Evan, but Evan is later referred to as "nearly 40". Matt is identified as 42, but later is described as approaching 45.) And the ellipses... God, the ellipses. Every conversation--sometimes every line of dialogue--is littered with ellipses. There are 832 ellipses in this book. That's a lot of ellipses.

There are also a lot of shifts in the point of view. Most of the time they're delineated by section breaks, but there are also switches within the same narrative. Sometimes those switches are even to secondary characters, which makes them particularly jarring.

Other Thoughts:
I read this as a PDF, and the formatting is all sorts of crazy. There's white space where there shouldn't be white space and line breaks and indents where there should be a continuous flow. I'd thought it might be due to something with my Kindle Fire (which has thrown funky formatting at me on other PDFs), but viewing it on my laptop has the same formatting errors. Until I got the hang of reading where there was supposed to be white space and where there wasn't, things were a bit confusing.

Another thing that bothers me is the set-up for the sequel: After Evan pushes Matt away, Matt mopes about and after a while ends up at a bar to get his drunk on and maybe pick up some tail. While there, he meets James, in town for an unknown reason (at least that I can recall). They bond over beer and broken hearts, and eventually end up going back to James's hotel room and getting freaky. Not only was it very transparent as a set-up for James's story, but the ease with which Matt fell into bed with James was kind of startling. I was half-expecting the story to end with Matt and James getting together, while Evan went on with his miserable life.

Overall:
Uneven pacing bogged down by angst and problematic writing made this a difficult book for me to like. Although the characters are interesting beneath their grief, a little more growth and a little less wallowing would have helped make this ultimately-unsatisfying story shine.