Soul Bonds By Lynn Lorenz

Each book I read seems to raise the bar, but I honestly think Soul Bonds is one of the worst books I have ever read. This is especially annoying because I'd read one of Lynn Lorenz's books previously and while it didn't blow me away, I'd found it perfectly readable. This, on the other hand? Not so much.

Lorenz's prose is still perfectly readable, if a little florid (there's a lot of use of 'backdoor' and 'sweet rose', if you know what I mean). But the premise, the characterization and execution are all so painfully ludicrous that I couldn't wait to get to the end and, if I wasn't reading it for a specific purpose, I would've put it down long ago. Worse, there's actually a kernel of a really brilliant idea here (imo) that Lorenz completely overlooked.

(completely and incredibly spoilery beneath the cut)

The premise of the story is one that should, actually, be custom designed for my narrative kinks. Sammi (yes, that's a male name, don't even get me started) is a sex slave, owned by the dastardly Donovan. He escapes from Donovan's clutches and takes to picking up men in bars so that he can hide out at their place overnight. He's aided in this by his (undefined) mental abilities that allow him to read emotion and thought and anticipate his lover's every sexual want and need. One night, on the prowl, he comes across Mitchell, and discovers that Mitchell is his soul mate. Literally.

Now. Like I said, there's a really interesting idea here: Sammi is young, poor, uneducated, from an abusive background—both at his natural home and in foster care—and a street hustler turned high-class sex slave turned street hustler. Though he's a tremendously stereotypical figure, he's also a character with a lot of potentiality, especially when contrasted with the older, more 'normal' Mitchell.

Mitchell is much more opaque (or really, much less developed) than Sammi. He's an engineer who works at a cube farm. He had one significant lover, who died, and he's been drifting ever since. He has one best friend, the P.I., Brian. His homophobic boss hates him. And…that's really all we know about Mitchell.

But in any case, there's an interesting implication in Lorenz's set-up: what do you do when your soul mate is a (potentially amoral) grifter/hustler who uses the soul bond to bind you to them for life just to force you to protect them from their enemies? How do you love and trust someone who would use your love and trust in that way?

Alas, that is distinctly not the story Lorenz writes.

Instead, Lorenz completely ignores her own set up in favor of a bunch of shallow, ridiculous events that don't really exploit or explore her own world-building. Which brings me back to Sammi again.

A street-urchin with no special training to develop his gift, it doesn't make any logical sense that Sammi would know a soul bond when he feels it or how to exploit it with Mitchell. It makes no logical sense that Sammi (however good a lay his mental powers make him), at twenty-three (and thus of no interest to pedophiles) and with no education to speak of or deportment training (to make more of him than a bed-toy), would be worth half a million dollars to a mysterious buyer in Rome—unless they know of and are planning to exploit his mental powers. However, their intentionality must be taken as read, since it's yet another plot line left ultimately unexplored except for its face value. And Sammi himself, though he's been on his own from a very young age and only under Donovan's thumb for the last three years of his life, is written more like a sheltered child than a street-wise, grown-up-too-soon man.

A lot is left unexplored and in really strange ways that shatter my suspension of disbelief. I can more-or-less swallow the set up of Sammi meeting and picking up Mitchell in the bar, using the attraction of the soul bond and his own mental powers to overcome Mitchell's reservations. Okay, sure. But after having been 'lifeless' and numb since the death of his previous partner, the fact that Mitchell finds himself in love, that he takes Sammi in without question, that he's willing to support Sammi financially and emotionally after one night and almost zero conversation…it stretches belief that Mitchell wouldn't have some concerns about himself, about Sammi and about the relationship, especially given what a straight arrow he seems to be.

It further stretches credibility beyond the breaking point when, after Donovan's muscle has broken into Mitchell's apartment to retrieve Sammi, prompting Sammi and Mitchell to go on the lam, that not only does Mitchell continue to have no questions about what the hell is going on, Mitchell's friend Brian has no concerns, either, when Sammi & Mitchell show up on his doorstep. I don't know about you, but if my BFF shows up one night out of the blue and tells me how he and his new boyfriend of two days, the hustler—who is living with hims—need a place to stay, because the hustler's crazy ex has forced them out of the apartment…I'm going to have some concerns. I'm going to need to take my friend aside at some point and make sure they haven't lost their mind and that the hustler isn't taking advantage of them. My loyalty is going to be with my friend and while I might be willing to give the two of them a place to stay and my support, my loyalty is not going to automatically spread to double-wide coverage. That shit has to be earned, thank you.

And why did no one call the police? Why in gods' name did no one even think to call the police? I can kind of hand-wave it for Sammi, who has probably been pathologically avoiding the police (and any agent of authority) his entire life, but why on earth didn't Mitchell or Brian, both 'normal', law-abiding citizens not call the police? I could have accepted even a specious, hand-wavy reason, but the fact that no one even thought of it at all, even to dismiss the possibility, is beyond the pale. It feels even less likely when Donovan's goon makes a ruckus at Mitchell's job and none of the cube dwellers there call the police, either.

The unreality continues this way, culminating when Sammi and Mitchell are captured by Donovan's goon and taken back to Donovan's penthouse. You know, the place he actually lives? The entirely identifiable address where he lives? Yeah.

So the goon takes Sammi and Mitchell to the penthouse and this is where Lorenz decided to call into question all the aspects of Sammi & Mitchell's relationship into question that should have been on Mitchell's mind from the start.

Sidebar: And really, I'm loathe to even call what Sammi & Mitchell have a relationship. Lorenz makes the same cheap mistake that a lot of authors make when writing soul bonds: she tries to substitute the mere existence of the soul bond as a substitute for chemistry, conversation or time spent doing any thing other than fucking. And, truthfully, it never works. It's always cheap and facile and fake as…well, as fucking a street hustler and trying to pretend it's love. /sidebar

So, in the course of this confab with Donovan, Mitchell gets knocked around a little, resulting in an out-of-nowhere moment where Sammi shares Mitchell's pain—and his broken nose. Consistent with the illogic of Sammi knowing that he and Mitchell are soul bonded, this moment of shared pain leads Domick to instantly deduce that Mitchell and Sammi are soul bonded and he has his goon hustle Mitchell out of there…only to drive him safely home.

There's so much wrong here that I don't even know how to start unpacking it all. But let's start like this: as with Sammi, there's no textual reference or reason given for Donovan to even know what a soul bond is, let alone that it's the first (correct) conclusion he'd draw from the events at hand. It makes no sense that his first thought would be "soul bonds" and have that be the case. Hell, most people you meet on the street probably wouldn't know what a soul bond is, if you asked them. It's not a commonplace part of modern culture. So there's that.

Then, too, there's the utter stupidity that Donovan would bring Mitchell to his personal home, make him aware of the nature of his business, openly expose himself to kidnapping (at the least) charges (of Mitchell, if not Sammi)…and then not only let Mitchell go, but have his man just drive Mitchell home and drop him off. While Sammi might have a harder time selling a case to the DA because of his background and lack of credentials, Mitchell is a fairly upstanding member of the law-abiding, aboveboard community. He'd make a damn fine credible witness. So unless Donovan was planning to pull up stakes and completely vacate, it's shooting himself in the foot to: a) let Mitchell see him, let alone in the commission of a crime, b) let Mitchell know where he lives, so he can lead the police straight to his door (if it ever occurred to Mitchell to call the police for anything, which I have my doubts about) and c) let Mitchell go.

Of course, Donovan isn't the only stupid one. Mitchell gets back to his apartment (after figuring out in the elevator on the way down that he and Sammi are soul bonded; again, an assumption there is ZERO BASIS FOR) and, instead of calling the police, as any sensible person would, especially one who is supposedly so deeply in love with the person who is now being held captive, Mitchell calls his BFF Brian. And then he takes a nap.

*headdesk, headdesk, headdesk*

The denouement is just as ludicrous as the rest. Brian, at least, cops a clue and calls the police. Not unreasonably, the police have been sniffing around Donovan's trail for some time; this is just the excuse they need to get a solid arrest. And hey, while they're out, why don't Brian and Mitchell come along on the raid?? You know, just for kicks?

Then, though the entire book is called Soul Bonds and has a general premise of soul bonding, the only time Lorenz actually makes use of the soul bond is for Mitchell to soothe the claustrophobic Sammi (who is locked in a closet as a means of keeping him docile) as they make their way up to the penthouse. Donovan and his goon are easily arrested and, with Sammi's testimony, they'll be put away for a long time, allowing Sammi and Mitchell to get back to their soul bonded man-loving (with some random, equally out of nowhere BDSM—with bonus ball waxing!)

And now I can finally, thankfully move on to another book.