Book Review: The Wag and The Scoundrel by Debbie McGowan

I love books, I love to read, I love the written word and I love to read in a lot of different genres. I read everything from classics of Kafka, Brontë, Austen, Shakespeare, to horror or crime such as John Grisham and Dean R. Koontz and so on and so forth to contemporary romance novels. There’s not much I don’t read, or many genres I can’t find authors to love.

However, there's one thing I’ve noticed with the LGBTQ community of authors, including myself, is that very few just write books. Books for the masses books about people who just happen to be something other the standard straight, white, christian. This thing we call sexual orientation is very important in the quest of not having it be so important. Mind you now I’m not saying this is always a bad thing, talking about matters will defuse them and eventually whatever made a hype out of one thing will be gone and commonly accepted, I’m just claiming it is how many people in MY oppinion write . Nothing wrong with it it’s just how it is.

With Debbie McGowan’s books, sex and sexual orientation is something distant, it’s not this huge statement or discussion, sex is something everyone has so it's like "knock yourself dead" and sexual orientation, it’s who you are no matter what that is so what's there to discuss. I am not saying it isn’t important factor in McGowan books but she has a way of wording things that makes them so acceptable that you just sort of nod and goes along with whatever she says. It's all the norm.

In the Wag and the Scoundrel Debbie McGowen’s characters are diverse but yet familiar that it doesn’t matter what their sexual orientation is or gender or color of their skin or political views they could all be you in one way or another. Gray, the widower, Rob the soon to be divorced, Will, the animal rights activist and ex banker gone surfer, Aaron and Naomi are so freaking brilliantly done I might actually have whooped a little; but they are all regular dudes and dudettes with very much of the same type of problems. Debbie McGowan is one of a small group of authors I'm currently reading that truly know how to make, all those things we all want to be non issues, into just that a non issue. That is a gift in itself.

When it comes to The Wag and the Scoundrel it’s a suspense and crime story, and I love those kind of stories, I prefer them when reading in a way, or rather I prefer stories that are about more boy meets boy or girl, I like stories about real life. Just like John Grisham, McGowan, focuses the drama on the actual case of “who’s done it” instead of the act of violence of seeing the crime being committed. That doesn’t just cause the story to become more of a suspense story because she as a writer can focus on more calm details in the investigation instead of the hard quick actions in the crime moment.

What I like most about this particular book are two things, one, the flow between keeping the pace of the actual case of investigating the murder going, so it doesn’t stagnate and sort of just flimsy out around in the course of getting people together as couples or sorting their personal lives out. The story is the crime committed that involves a lot of people whose life are intertwined. That is the second thing I love about this book, all the different characters that we get to follow and their personal lives as a side story to the crime investigation. It is a nice side step from the crime story, to say it lightens it up maybe a bit over exaggerated because damn these people got issues the size of a small European country, I am not jealous but we get to follow them on their personal journeys as well and I liked that a lot. I can tell you this I usually don’t spend too much time dwelling on who will end up with who, because let’s face it most romances are pretty easy to figure that one out, but since this isn’t a romance and that was pretty clear from get go I was muttering quite a lot and was ready to kick ass if Gray didn’t get his head out of his arse.

In all, Debbie McGowan write books for the masses, they are not simply LGBTQ books, well they are but I hate labels, books are books, and if I want a crime I look there and there’s where this book fits in. The Wag and the Scoundrel will have you turning that page after page till you come to the last one, because you just want to know who one done it and what the heck happens to everyone and I’ll tell you Debbie is goooood at keeping you on your toes! Finally what I have to say is move over John Grisham there’s a new crime author in town!

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