Gangster Country Paperback – December 6, 2013

So, Kade Boehme has been one of my favorite authors for a while now. I have read all of his books and I like all of them, some of them I absolutely love. One thing I have always loved about his books is that there isn't any insta-love. The MCs in his novels have to work very hard for their HEAs. I feel that is the way it should be. Anything worth having is worth working hard for.In this newest book Logan and Gianni have to work through what seems to be impossible odds. These two men couldn't be anymore different if they tried.Logan is an Ivy League educated farm boy from Texas. His father is a preacher, yet he still loves and supports Logan. Even though he is very close to his parents he moves to New York to work for DCF and he feels he really makes a difference.Gianni is a high school dropout that is second only to his brother in one of the street gangs in New York. Gianni sells drugs, dishes out punishment and eliminates people all on the orders of his brother. He has no room in his life for emotions. He can never come out, not to the gang or to his family. He would lose everything, including his life.What Gianni doesn't expect is to meet Logan. What is supposed to be a one night stand grows and thrives for over a year. Gianni tries to keep some sort of distance between himself and Logan, but he seems destined to fail. They have both gone way beyond casual sex, they are both in love, they just won't admit it to themselves or each other.When the inevitable happens and their two very different lives collide Gianni has to make a choice between what he has always known and the man he loves. This decision will change both of their lives in many different ways. There will be no going back. There will have to be concessions made by both of these men if they want even a small chance at normal.In my opinion this is the best book Kade Boehme has written so far. His writing style is very clear and I always feel like I know the MCs personally. Gianni is the type of character that you really should hate. He is that type of guy you wouldn't want your son or daughter to bring home, and yet I have nothing but love for him. By the end of the book I was rooting for him! How does that happen? It happens through GREAT writing.I highly recommend this book and I dare you not to like it!!! If I could I would give it 10 stars!

There are rare times (and this is one of them) when it seems like I'm reading an entirely different book than the other reviewers."Gangster Country" got a slew of almost-over-the-top 5-star reviews. I bought the book based on the reviews, but now that I'm reading it, I am absolutely baffled by them. I had such difficulty reading this book, I gave up on it.And some of the comments in the reviews really led me to believe that there might be two books with the same name? Or two versions, the latest of which suffered from almost-incredibly poor (or lacking) editing?This is the story of a social worker from the rural south transplanted to New York to "do some good", and an Italian/Puerto Rican gangster who, it seems to me, is a classic sociopath - wreaking whatever mayhem his gang requires of him, then spending his nights with his too-good-to-be-true lover spouting cliched metaphors using a lot of words like "languid" in some abortive effort to wax poetic.One of the other reviewers was thrilled that this was not "insta-love". My Kindle version must have been missing some pages because, on one page the two MCs are left arguing in an elevator (but agreeing to get a beer together) and the next page - they've been living together for more than a year. If that isn't "insta-love", it's something even beyond that - unique in both its brevity and lack of development.But that's not what made me stop reading. Not the hackneyed writing, nor the unbelievable characters and not even the stilted dialogue. What got to me, almost from the very beginning, was the utter conviction that this must have been the author's first draft. Within the first thirty pages, I lost count of the number of sentences missing subjects, verbs, participles, requiring the reader to somehow "decode" the author's intent. I can't read like that. Every time that happens, I'm popped out of the story, scratching my head. thinking about the author and the page instead of the characters and the story.I think what finally forced me to give up was the number of times the author forgot the characters' names. Within the first five pages, Marco returns to the bar while Marco makes his way to the elevator (it's Gianni who goes to the elevator). If I have to map out the characters to figure out who is who and rename them in order to match the context, the author has not done his or her job and deserves neither my time nor my money.To be honest, the book seriously ticked me off and I did what I almost never do - abandoned it.

Wow! Kade is already on my auto-buy list, but this book reminded me of WHY.The characters are fully fleshed out, never one dimensional. Even the "bad guys" aren't quite archetypal.The characters and plot might sound cliched, but Kade's treatment of them never are. He has a real abilityto take the "expected" and produce something greatly superior to what others might have done with the same story.I immediately liked Gianni and Logan and their chemistry together, and loved all the sub-characters (especially Gabe, hope we get his story *nudge nudge Kade!* I liked this story so well that not even the typos that slipped past the editor bothered me. LOL!The only critique I initially HAD was that I didn't believe that Logan's backstory could be so cool and his parents could be so great. But THAT gave me self reflection and the realization that having a genre inundated with horror story beginnings has made me bitter and unhopeful. It made me realize that NOT everyone comes from a HORRIBLE beginning, not everyone runs to New York to ESCAPE. Having a flash light turned on THAT generalization and negative stereotype was very thought provoking for me. I really want to thank the author for that. <3