Zero at the Bone by Jane Seville

[This is a reprint of a previously posted review; it is posted here for posterity]

Zero At The Bone is (for me) a difficult book to talk about or characterize, because on the one hand, I was very involved in the story, I was engaged by the relationship and so, in very broad strokes, I would say I enjoyed it.

At the same time, there were so many small, niggling quibbles I had with the story that I found myself simultaneously frequently irritated by it, rolling my eyes at it and generally making my husband miserable as I talked back to the book. (Someday I hope he'll get used to this, but I'm not holding my breath.)

In trying to quantify my irritation with the book, my first thought about it is that it's a slash story, rather than a LGBT thriller/romance, which are two very different beasts, imo. And now, having said that, I'm going to dance away from that point and talk about some other specifics that will, hopefully, lead back into establishing what I mean by that.

(Detailed spoilers after the cut)

First of all, I didn't like Jack. It took nearly the whole book for me to realize that, but I honestly didn't like Jack and I never felt for his man-pain as much as I think I was supposed to. And that's a little surprising to me, because Jack is usually the character I would empathize/identify with most strongly, with his strong morality about doing the right thing at the cost of his own life (either literally or figuratively, through the need for him to go into Witsec). I would also usually empathize strongly about the sense of loss he undergoes through the course of the story, losing his home, job, family, friends and even his identity, in the interest of doing the right thing. Normally, this would be the kind of character I would eat up with a spoon. So why didn't I?

1. I don't think Jack's sense of loss is really present in the story. There is, of course, the loss of identity in that he's no longer Dr. Jack Francisco, and there's the loss of his job, for which he's spent a lifetime preparing. And while I'm not trying to undercut those losses, which are great…other than that, Jack didn't seem to have much to lose. Though we know he's lost the ability to have contact with family and friends, we have no connection to anyone specific, no one that Jack is missing in particular, just a faceless mass of people. Late in the book, Jack explicitly admits that his life was largely void of connection: he'd lost all his friends, he had no lovers and there's still no mention of family at all. But more than that, there's no real sense of history to Jack. Up until the point where the attraction between Jack and D becomes explicit, there's no indication that either of these men has ever been attracted to another man before and the text references an ex-wife for both of them. That's not to say that I need either of them to be more explicitly—or flamingly—gay, but I think the book would've been stronger if there'd been some indication that Jack had a life before D. The absence of a history—or even the sense of a history—for him left him feeling like a much less rounded (less real) character and made the story feel like the "I'm not gay, I'm just gay for YOU" trope, which is not a favorite. To be fair, I think Seville made some effort at the end to say/show that both Jack and D weren't just queer for each other, but it was so late in the game, at that point. I wish she'd taken care to establish that sooner and I wish that she's given Jack more a sense of history. Especially since D has such a filled in history.

2. To me, Jack comes off as tremendously privileged. This is something I have less a concrete basis for than a basic, irrational, gut feeling. But. Going back to my previous point, the main thing that Jack loses is his job. Which is devastating, especially given the years of schooling he's gone through to get it, don't get me wrong, but the fact that most of his brow-clutching revolves around a job rather than people is less sympathetic—to me!—than if the opposite were true. I also feel that Jack's constant demands for information from D is incredibly privileged—especially when so many of those demands are for personal/emotional information from D that Jack is not entitled to on their very short acquaintance. In one sense, it fits very well with the image of a privileged and well-respected doctor, used to having his own way and his demands met, but again, it made him less sympathetic a character to me and was actively irritating at times.

3. The crying. I mean this literally and metaphorically; the literal amount of time that Jack spent welling up in tears, either because of the beauty of what was going on or the epic unfairness of what was going on was a huge turn-off. I'm not quite of the school that men can only honorably cry if they're watching Brian's Song, but I also don't like characters (male or female, for that matter) who are tearing up or bursting into tears every five minutes. Metaphorically, Jack had way too many 'feeling' moments for me. I mean…okay, I write slash. I am down with the stories about boys talking about their feelings. To a point. But there were so many times I felt like the book crossed that line, especially with two characters that have so little reason to trust each other or want to open up to each other. At one point, Jack muses on the fact that he's cast as the damsel in distress part of the scenario and while I won't stereotype gender so much as to statically characterize men or women in that way, I do feel that Jack often fills the stereotypical, Hollywood infused "woman" role throughout the book, even down to the openness of his body language. (and the lack of lube; more on this later)

D, on the other hand, became my character of choice. Not because of his epic man-pain so much as the reasons I tend to gravitate toward military and hit man type characters: they're efficient, ruthlessly practical, they don't spend nearly as much time in Hamlet-esque brow-clutching about the misfortunes of fate. Secondly, because D does have the history that Jack is so painfully missing, it's much easier for me to feel for D. At the beginning of the book, he's so shut down and shut in, so self-protected from his pain and the things that he's done that he questions not only his manhood, but his humanity, for all intents and purposes, sexually non-functional. He's a Terminator, by presentation. Too, because of this, much of the book is taken up by his transformation. Though Jack is the one in danger and the catalyst for events, it's much more D's book. He is the one with the character arc, he's the one who goes through the greatest change to reach his reward by the end.

That being said, I really couldn't stand D's dialectical speech all the way through. I've never been a huge fan of dialectical speech and I feel like a little goes a long way. It was incredibly distracting and incredibly annoying that every single sentence of dialogue that D spoke had to have the 'to', 'you' and 'can't' altered into 'ta', 'ya' and 'cain't'. I get it. He's got an accent. Fine. Now knock it off.

One of my pet peeves of fanfic versus profic (and I'm not saying profic is free of this problem, btw) is the number of authors that take the easy way out. I've talked about this most specifically regarding the Criminal Minds fandom and a lot of my issues there are relevant to my complaints here. D is an extremely damaged individual. Extremely damaged, both by external and internal events.

His personal tragedy—the loss of his wife and beloved daughter, and the subsequent feelings of inadequacy and impotence—was co-opted and corrupted by his military supervisors (the people who are, on some level, supposed to be protecting him) to turn him into a killing machine. Further, given his implied disconnection from his family, the lack of any mention of his parents…it can be implied that D's problems didn't start with the military. And add to that the fact that he's deeply disassociated from his own sexuality…it's a lot of damage. D is really, really fucked up. And while Seville gives a nod to that by showing everything is not hearts and flowers between D and Jack by the end (and kudos to her for that, even if the ending chapters dragged on WAY TOO LONG) a lot of D's problems do seem to miraculously clear up through the luvin' of a good man and the healing power of cock. In, like…three months (I'm not 100% clear on the timeline while they were on the run, but the implication is that this all happens over the summer, iirc).

Too, there's not a lot of room for Jack to deal with his issues while on the run and he does have the aforementioned empty life, but his resolutions feel as slickly easy as D's: he gets his life, name and beloved job back and he gets D on top of it, the love of his life. Whereas D has a pretty big character arc with a lot of internal and external change, Jack more or less ends up in the same place he left (okay, he moves to Ohio…seriously? Ohio?) but with the addition of a hot, hunky former-hitman-gone-legit partner. The lack of any real change for Jack and the easy resolution is less than satisfying for me.

Now some more random thoughts:

I really dislike it when an author spends 90% of a book in a single (or even dual) POV and then, somewhere in the last third of the book or so, introduces a new POV character. I dislike it even more when that character's POV is only used once or twice and then never heard from again. It speaks of sloppy writing to me. 90% of the book is split between Jack and D, but there are random appearances by Petros and Megan as POV characters and it was just…sloppy. Find another way to get at the information or incorporate other POVs from the beginning.

The rescue of Jack and D from Josey's (also Josie…pick a spelling, yo) evil clutches smacks a lot of dues ex machine. The style of the book is very much like an action movie and I know that kind of rescue is their stock in trade, but the convenience of Petros alerting Megan that something was up and then Megan getting through to Churchill and then the Witsec team assembling and arriving just in time…yeah. Bring on the chariots of the gods, man. The whole Josey/revenge/good business plot was kind of convoluted and meh anyway. Obviously, it was really just an excuse to get these two and on the run and fall in love…but maybe that shouldn't have been so obvious.

Sex, affection, the lack of lube and body language. Going back to slash tropes, I found the rampant lack of lube through much of book and Jack's seemingly endless ability to come without having his dick touched a little annoying. Further, the fact that neither of them (paranoid hitman and highly professional doctor) had a single thought or qualm about immediately and consistently bare-backing it was a little WTF.

Too—and a little more nitpicky—I was a little put off by how immediately and profoundly affectionate Jack became once he and D were sexually involved. IDK. That one's a little hard for me and rootbound in my own ideas about affection and masculinity, but if Jack were that affectionate, it would seem to me that he would have more interpersonal relationships and that it would similarly manifest in those relationships rather than spring Athena-like from Seville's forehead. The amount of affection Jack displays and the relative ease of it goes back to what I said about Jack coming across like a stereotypical Hollywood heroine.

I'm also a little sketchy about how easily D's vestigial gay panic was dealt with. On the one hand, okay, yeah. Gay panic is somewhat overrated. OTOH, the subtextual clues about D seems to suggest that he comes from a very blue-collar, heteronormative, under-privileged background. He married the girl he knocked up, even though he wasn't particularly attracted to her or interested in a hetero relationship, with the implication of "because that's what you do". He went into the Army to support his ex and child, because it was the only way he saw to provide them with a decent living wage and live up to his responsibilities. He served in the DADT Army and his one previous homosexual experience ended with the guy going bugshit and trying to knife him after just a hand job. And then he completely divorces himself from any expression of sexuality at all for several years, even masturbation. So while gay panic isn't all it's cracked up to be, if there was a character that was crying out for a little gay panic, it's D. His easy acceptance of Jack's queerness and his own seems less character motivated and more like the author wanting to gloss pass all that messy psychological stuff.

(y'all know how I like my messy psychological stuff)

Similarly, the lack of any prejudice or even reserve among all the peripheral characters felt unrealistic and more like the wish-fulfillment of slash, where we are more likely to write stories about unremarkable mpreg and the existence of similarly unremarkable same-sex full-status marriages in Victorian England. Further, the idea that Megan, and Churchill, in particular, would act as Jack and D's yentas just reads completely false. I can kind of handwave Megan, because she's dedicated so much of her life to following D around and trying to fulfill her life-debt to him (and I have some issues with her damage and lack of internal life and her apparently endless ability to blow off her job to follow D around, but okay, whatever) but it's much more difficult to imagine Churchill (who is supposed to be good at his job) thinking that his star witness hooking up with an assassin is a good or smart or security conscious idea, no matter how much they love each other. I certainly have a nearly impossible time imagining him letting D come and hang out in Jack's hotel room, no matter how necessary that very thing was to the set up of the denouement.

The resolution. It's very difficult for me to imagine that the Dominguez brothers' lawyer was so incompetent that he set Jack up to make such a thorough slam-dunk in the courtroom, however emotionally satisfying it was to read Jack's smack-down (and it was satisfying, don't get me wrong). It was such a huge and inexplicable misstep that I felt like it had to be the set up for some other legal wrangle further down the line…except it wasn't.

It's difficult for me to imagine that D had the capability of seducing and setting up the six lieutenants of the Domingez's organization, though I can kind of hand wave that with the idea that D was just really thorough with the people he picked. But it's a pretty big handwave, given that these people are giving up their way of life and all contact with everyone outside of their immediate family—plus the risk of any extraneous family members being executed as an example of the undesirability of desertion—all their belongings, all their friends, etc….in order to do what? Own a cantina and work their asses off to keep the business afloat? Like I said, it's a big handwave. It's mortally difficult to believe that everyone, up to and including Raoul Dominguez, would go along with this with no fuss, muss or bluster. It gives Jack a neatly wrapped up story-line, but I find it unbelievable in the extreme. Other than Josey/Josie's rather insane revenge scheme, everyone was entirely too rational, too willing to play along, too absent of their own agendas and ambitions to feel real.

But getting past all that, the ending simply dragged on too long. Though I don't think Seville needed to necessarily end the story the moment Jack and D got together for good, so much of what happened afterward felt extraneous, gratuitous and unnecessary, as well as being the obvious set up for a sequel. And while that's good for the author (and despite all my criticism here, I would be interested in buying and reading the sequel; I am that invested in Jack and D and where they go from here), it wasn't so good for the story, leaving the ending feeling messy and literally unfinished, lacking in solid closure.

I do believe it's possible to give a story solid closure and leave room for a sequel, but so much of the final chapter/s and the epilogue were devoted to setting up the mystery of D's new case (and really…at the end of a romance when I should be basking in the awesomeness of Jack & D, did I really need to hear about a seven year old getting raped and tortured to death??) and the fact that Jack and D still have a lot to work out between themselves and the rest of their lives that it took away from the afterglow feeling I like to walk away from my books with and I feel like it all would've been better served to start the next book than finish this one.