Conversations in Real Time

This was a surprise and for a stretch a good one but then ... sigh I don't know. It went down an unexpected, but well known road, and I guess I was just disappointed at getting something other than what I hoped for in the first pages.

I knew ZERO about it, I think I picked it up in a Smashwords sale, probably solely based on the cover, and it has sat, along with many others, in my iBooks app. I don't visit it often and that's a mistake.

It started off with emails and I was tickled pink. I thought it was to be an epistolary novel, and it is to a certain point. James and Daniel reside in L.A. and Oxford respectively. Daniel, a Doctorate student in Forensic Pathology, contacts James, lieutenant in the LAPD Cold Case unit, to offer help in a case. Over the course of some correspondence they discover an affinity, which grows into a friendship, and I was enjoying it immensely. They progressed to IMs and some phone calls which is where, for me, the story petered into pedestrian and improbable. If the characters are going to forgo the "mystery" of only communicating by letters, or in this case email, and move to IMs and phone calls they would very likely exchange pics, facetime, etc. The sexting via IMs wholly implausible. If you're in the midst of orgasming from sexting you don't have the wherewithal to type much less annotate messages with *kisses top of head**pulling you into my arms* or *reaches over and cups cheeks, your beard scratching my hands* etc, you get the drift. A great many things about the MC past histories, their jobs/careers, are alluded to but never fleshed out, the I-Love-Yous come too easy, and I think that a HFN would've been more honest.

I did like the writing style and I might check out the writer's other book.