Book Review: Laura Baumbach’s Hostage

Posted August 16, 2012 by Kathy Davie in

There are four stories revolving around a general theme of being taken hostage and involving gay men.

The Stories

Josh Lanyon‘s “Dangerous Ground” follows a tense period in the lives of two FBI partners trying to come back from an almost fatal shooting of one of them. Will is feeling guilty. That his rejection of Taylor is one of the reasons that Taylor stopped that bullet. This hike into the mountains for the weekend is meant to help them get back in sync. Only, the gang who robbed the Black Wolf Casino has other ideas.

Good story about friendship and the miscommunications and expectations friends can experience.

Sarah Black‘s “Second Indian War” is about a reporter whose hobby is old landscape cameras and Sam has been wanting to photograph the area around Tsegi Canyon on the Navajo Reservation for a very long time. Only his occupation and fortuitous appearance at the diner makes his trip the ideal hostage opportunity for a trio of Navajos trying to gain publicity about the government’s stall tactics over paying reparations to the Navajos affected by the uranium mining on the reservation.

This is more of an environmental and reparations exposure than it is about a gay hostage. A sad story about the lengths government and business will go to avoid responsibility.

Laura Baumbach‘s “Burn Card” is such a sweet story about a couple who are very much in love. Cody Baxter is a policeman working CSI in Las Vegas while Gil Turko is a media darling and in his fourth? working incarnation, this time he’s providing bodyguards.

It’s an unfortunate night when one of the clients Gil’s company is guarding is murdered and Cody just happens to be the unlucky CSI on scene.

Sarah Black‘s “Classic Story of Good and Evil” points up the stupidity of “don’t ask, don’t tell” in the military. Lieutenant “Hutch” Hutchins and First Lieutenant Daniel “Dog” Dawson are both Marines and hotshot helicopter pilots. Hutch wants Dog and Dog is deep in denial. He has a dream about being in the Apollo program and his being outed as gay will kill that dream. Meantime, both men are who you want to pull you out of a hot zone in the jungles of Vietnam.

I did enjoy Hutch’s analysis of the classic Western, LOL.

The Cover and Title

The cover is pretty cheesy looking with a slender, but muscled man wearing jeans and tied up to a chair. Floating in the background to the left is an enlarged image of a man’s face, a hat brim shading his eyes so we only see a blur of his nose and mouth.

There are many ways a person can be held Hostage when his sexual orientation is involved.