Stranded Book 2
M/M Romance
Dreamspinner Press
October 27, 2013
200
Reviewed by: Linda Tonis
Member of the Paranormal Romance Review Team
Roman Capanelli is a choreographer on Broadway. His partner, Malik Stevens, is a cyber-security developer and today should be the happiest day of their lives. Today, surrounded by family and friends, Roman and Malik are to be married in Central Park, however things do not go as expected. When Malik fails to show up for his own wedding, Roman cannot accept the fact that the man he has lived with and loved for two years just decided he did not want to be married to him.
No matter how hard everyone tries to contact Malik, there is no response. Now with his mom and friends by his side, Roman sits in his apartment wondering what went wrong. Malik told him he loved him, he proposed and helped with all the wedding arrangements. How could he just walk away without so much as a goodbye? What Roman doesn’t know is that in another part of the city, Malik is being held prisoner in a dark room, wondering if the man he loves will ever forgive him for not being at the wedding.
Malik was a man who was quiet, reserved, and filled with all kinds of quirks. His childhood was a nightmare. His father was sent to prison for being a rapist and serial killer and his mother drank and took drugs to forget. His father died two years after his arrest. Soon after, Malik was taken from his mother to go into foster care. Always afraid that his past would come up and people would believe that his father’s evil would be visited on the son, Malik kept to himself, until the day that Roman walked into his life.
Roman was the one who brought Malik out of his shell and taught him how to love. Now Roman is left wondering how everything could have gone so wrong. After a few torturous days, Roman finally begins to believe that there is something more to Malik’s disappearance. When questioning one of their neighbors he discovers that Malik did not leave voluntarily. He was dressed in his tuxedo on his way to meet Roman. Who has him and why? There has been no contact, no ransom demand.
Of course, Malik devises an ingenious way of trying to escape, a way that either will kill him or save him. Fortunately, it saves him and reunites him with the person he loves more than life itself. Escaping is just the beginning of things that go wrong, someone has not given up and is after Malik and for some unknown reason is after a letter that is supposed to be mailed to him, a letter even Malik knows nothing about. What could be in the letter? He has lost all contact with his family since his father’s arrest so what could it be?
As always, and I say that since I have yet to be disappointed in an Andrew Grey book, he has another winner. He has written not just a romance story, but a mystery as well. The book contains explicit sex and a who done it, and definitely keeps you wondering.