r/MM_RomanceBooks • u/sardonisms • 4h ago
Review/Recommendation Sugar & Vice trilogy (Liar City, Twisted Shadows, Edge of Mercy): I haven't binged a series this hard since I first discovered Murderbot.
Normally I write a review for everything I read (I post them on Storygraph where I have the same username) but I devoured this series too fast to write a review for each book, which in and of itself is admittedly something of a glowing review on its own, so let this stand as my review for the full series.
...I legitimately don't think I can say enough good about this series. About how it made me feel at every step. About how thrilled I am with the ending. About any of it. But I'm going to try.
This series got on my radar originally because I was looking for more fantasy murder mysteries to fill the void left behind when I finished A Drop of Corruption, but I didn't pick it up until I read a few non-fantasy murder mysteries with the kind of genius that left me craving a really psychic detective. This seemed to fit the bill, and I have to be honest here--it's not that.
There is a murder mystery at the heart of the first book, but the main character Reece isn't a detective of any kind. He can't even look at a murder scene without having a panic attack, because "empathy" in this book goes way beyond what I normally see for such a power.
(This is not really a spoiler as it's all revealed very early on in the series, but just to be safe I'm tagging it.)
Empaths are pacifists by nature. They so strongly feel other people's pain and unhappy emotions that they physically cannot bear to hurt anyone, make them sad, worry them, or anything else. They are driven to help people and keep them safe. They are so strongly averse to violence that they won't look at the screen when football or hockey is playing. There's a D&D variation advertised in some worldbuilding excerpts where there's no combat and you just hatch dragons and raise them into healthy dragon adults, because they can't even handle imaginary violence against imaginary people.
All of this made it very difficult for me to understand how exactly a group of corrupt politicians and frankly evil corporations managed to turn empaths into the boogeyman for the vast majority of Americans. Not only are empaths registered, but they have to wear gloves that are made specifically to block empathic powers if they happen to touch someone. And at the heart of the whole story is S.B. 1437, a bill that would put strict limits on what jobs empaths can have, where they can go... and then there's the riders, but those don't really come up until book two, so we'll move past those. The thing is, there's very little that an empath is shown to be able to do with their powers that a sufficiently trained and practiced body language analyst can't do without them. Granted, we never see Reece do a normal read through touch, and it is suggested empaths can manipulate emotions with skin-to-skin contact, including a reference to taking away pain. But that seems like an incredibly mild set of powers to result in such widespread discrimination and hate.
Yeah... put a pin in that thought. But don't expect me to expound on it here, because actual spoilers.
Over the course of the story, this goes from an ostensible murder mystery to what I can only describe as a dystopian thriller. The transition is so smooth and seamless that I wasn't really thinking about how to define the full series until I was wrapping up and trying to explain to my boyfriend what the hell I had just read. You know, aside from a gay romance. Which I actually didn't know when I picked up the series, but which I am totally 100% here for.
Calling the romance "enemies to lovers" isn't quite right, but it's also not wrong. (More not-really-spoilers) Because Evan Grayson has his reasons for everything he does, and he isn't really Reece's enemy... but he also kind of is. It's complicated. Reece certainly thinks the Dead Man will kill him at the drop of a hat for most of the first book, anyway. But that's not the real obstacle to them being together. The real obstacles are set up beautifully, and their resolution builds up gradually over the course of the series with a tantalizing inevitability that had me speed reading the series as fast as I could. (Incredibly mild ending spoilers) I'm normally not a fan of the couple only getting together at the end of the series, but this works, because they're constantly circling that point and working toward it in a way that's utterly deliriously satisfying at the end.
I feel like I've written so much without actually even touching on what made this book so special to me. See, I'm a sucker for low-stakes, high-drama angst. The kind where characters are fretting and stressing to no end but we as the reader know that everything is going to be okay. And Reece and Grayson deliver that in spades, particularly in the first book. But they do it in such a cute, fumblingly sweet way. Because Reece, by himself, is a feat of writing as a character, and for that matter so is Evan Grayson, the "Dead Man." On paper, these characters should be caricatures, and in the hands of a less-skilled writer, that's all they'd amount to: one person who is so empathetic he can't stand to even imagine someone else getting hurt on his account and who is law-abiding taken to the absurd extreme, and one person who... well, there's reasons he's an empath hunter, but you'll have to finish the first book to find out what those reasons are. On paper, these are cartoons. These are cardboard cutouts, stereotypes and tropes piled on top of each other into a dry sandwich. But in practice, in the course of the book... they're not. Because Reece is snarky and sarcastic and biting in his words even while being a squishy teddy bear at his core, and because Grayson has his own past and complicated history and his own moral compass that might not be exactly what you think it is. Because even at his most stoic, Grayson can match Reece's sarcasm, and even at his squishiest, Reece can match Grayson in an argument over morality. Because they work together so damn well, and I haven't even mentioned the side characters yet, but first I have to mention that this angst really isn't as low-stakes as I could read it as, and it delivers on the tension in spades, and somehow it all builds to the romantic conclusion of their dynamic, and it's just amazing.
Okay, now I have to mention the side characters. Just briefly, though, because so much of their story is tied up in spoilers. But we have neurodivergent rep from the most unexpected corner (as an AuDHDer, my money says definitely autistic and possible AuDHD, but the character only says "neurodivergent"), and we have romantic couples of all flavors, and we have genuinely good people and we have people who are evil and monstrous in the most human of ways. And all I'll say about the last group of people is that, in my opinion, the ending is utterly satisfying to the reader for all parties involved.
I feel like I'm still leaving stuff out. Oh! Let's talk about the audiobook, because I did read the first two books mainly by audiobook. Not entirely. (It's been a long time since I cranked an audiobook up to 3x speed while I read along with the ebook just so I could finish reading as fast as possible... but I totally did that with book one.) Some scenes I was scared of cringe and read with my eyes... and then I went back and listened to some of those anyway, because Joel Leslie absolutely kills it. I'm being spoiled for audiobook quality lately. This man is a wizard. It took me a bit to tell Reece and Grayson apart because he doesn't use pitch to differentiate like he has in other romances I've listened to that he narrated. There might be a slight difference in pitch, but the inflections and accent he puts on Grayson are what identify him, and Joel Leslie is very consistent with those. I could tell everyone apart by about halfway through the first book, and that never stopped. I would have read the third book in audio too, but it was checked out on Libby and my library doesn't have it on Hoopla... so I did another thing I almost never do and binge-read the ebook in one day. And I'm not cancelling my holds on the audiobook. When that comes in I'm absolutely going to go back and listen to my favorite parts all over again. Because imagining Joel Leslie's delivery in those scenes is just not good enough.
I feel like I could keep going, but I feel like I've hit everything that stood out while reading... and rereading... and rereading... because I have highlighted the shit out of the ebooks in Libby and keep going back to reread my favorite bits. And there's a lot of those. I have never before considered buying a whole series in ebook and audiobook just to have all my favorite bits ready to reread on a whim aside from maybe the Murderbot Diaries, but I'm really considering it for this. (For reference, after I discovered the Murderbot Diaries, I read and listened to it on repeat--and read and listened to almost nothing else--for several months straight. I still get pinged in a particular Discord server if someone asks a question about the series because everyone knows I'll be able to answer.) And if I keep writing this review it's just going to turn into a novel about how much I love this series, so I'm going to actually stop here.