The Lemon Drop Kid

De: Josh Lanyon

Narrado por: Andrew Gibson

How The Cookie Crumbled

As sole heir to the Bredahl Cookies and Cakes fortune, Casper led a comfortable, happy-go-lucky life. Some would say, a charmed life.

Sure, there were challenges: relentless pressure to join the family business, and his unrequited feelings for former high school crush Raleigh Jackson. But yeah, a charmed existence, compared to life after being arrested for murder and spending nearly a year in Chippewa Falls County Jail, awaiting trial.

Exoneration, freedom, came at too steep a price. To say Casper isn’t in the mood for the holidays, is putting it mildly. In fact, the only thing he wants for Christmas is to see Detective Raleigh Jackson, the man responsible for wrongly putting him behind bars, get his just desserts.

©2024 Josh Lanyon (P)2024 Josh Lanyon

Josh Lanyon never disappoint!

What a fantastic listen. Kept me engaged from beginning to end! Really enjoy the complex hate-love dynamic. If you are a fan of Josh Lanyon's works or never read any of her book before, then this is a must.

Not one of Josh’s best SPOILER ALERT

The plot had potential. The romance was believable, but formulaic. Characters were not explored in depth. If their backstories were more detailed it may have explained their current motivations and reactions. The ending. SPOILER: If a character embezzled vast $ over years, where was it, how did they spend it? Modern sleeping pills aren’t fatal.

Poor Baby

The mystery was easy to solve. The personality of the lead character came across as whiny. Part of that has to do with the fact that he'd gotten out of jail and his sister had committed suicide but absolutely no one cut this guy any slack. I'd bought the book because it's Christmas and the book was set at the Yuletide. I think if it had been better thought out it could have been a good book.

Josh did it again!

Josh consistently writes complex and flawed characters that capture how humans are messy and imperfect creatures that are somehow deeply lovable in their earnestness. Casper in "Lemon Drop Kid" is no exception. You feel his churning emotions. Casper is struggling with loss, hate, and confusion.

Casper's partner Detective Raleigh Jackson helped put him in jail for a murder he did not commit. Once exonerated Casper is literally and metaphorically struggling with the profound silence and physical toll of truly being alone. In jail Casper because use to living in an environment constantly filled with sound. Even if you were alone, you were not alone. And while incarcerated Casper had the illusion of a support system waiting for him on the outside.

Once free from being held in jail Casper's body viscerally rejects the deafening silence of his new life. You can feel the confusion he grapples with when he sees that he both loves and hates Raleigh. You can feel the weight he carries knowing he has no more family. He has a huge estate but no one to fill it. This hate and loneliness become a new prison for Casper.

In "Lemon Drop Kid" Josh explores how two things can be true at once, and sometimes you have to decide to be happy over being "right" because what hurts less? Forgiveness or holding onto fractures? And that's not perfect or ideal but it is what it is. And Casper doesn't paint everything over with a brush to smooth out the edges. It's not perfect and that's okay.

It's from wading through the sludge and darkness that the characters learn to appreciate the glimmering moments of "stillness." It's perfect in it's imperfection. Casper and Raleigh learn to love people based on their entirety.

Not Lanyon's best

I've read almost every Josh Lanyon book since the Adrien English days and--with a few exceptions--enjoyed them. She's one of the very few writers of M/M fiction who focuses on telling a good story before writing a prurient romance. This is a rare book of hers that is neither a compelling mystery nor a compelling romance. The protagonist spends 99% of the book wallowing in bitterness, and while, yes, he has a good reason, it gets old pretty quickly.

The mystery is among the most predictable of Lanyon's books, and the culprit as well as their motive are pretty obvious from the moment they're introduced.

The romance falls flat because it isn't actually resolved until the very end of the epilogue, and also I feel Caz is unfair in his resentment of Raleigh, his boyfriend who arrested him for murder. It seems as though Caz expected special treatment from him simply because they had been dating for a few months, which is--I suppose--understandable from his point of view, but it shouldn't be a point of view a reader would sympathize with. Raleigh is made to grovel for half the book simply for ethically doing his job, which is something I think cops should aspire to, not apologize for. Caz ended up being innocent, but he didn't LOOK innocent, and that's what we have trials for, no?

I don't know, I just didn't feel this one, sorry. For what it's worth, the writing was superb, as Lanyon's writing always is, and the narrator was good enough that I felt bad he wasn't used to narrate a better Lanyon book.