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.

Storm and drang

Obvious bad guy from the first page. Not the best by this author. It should’ve been a short story. Plot was simple.

Delivers like a favorite cocktail.

Here's hoping there's more to come. I'm inspired to hear more of this story. Another interesting place and charactures made by this author.

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.

More Murder/Love Than Mystery/Romance

Another well-written, engaging story from JL. I appreciate pivoting from the well-worn falsely accused trope and into recovering from 11 months in county jail and mad as hell. With cheery cloying Christmas music in the background.

Good story. Good narration.

Josh Lanyon's standalone stories are things to be hoarded for rainy days. Since I live in the Pacific Northwest, I am buying all of them. This one is just as entertaining as all the rest. I feel like I was dropped in the middle of a true crime drama with a gay romance and good writing for an added bonus.

The narrator, Andrew Gibson, did a great job of giving life to the characters. I think his voice was particularly well suited to this story. I am looking forward to the possibility of more stories with this author and narrator combo.

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.

This was to short.

The books story was so intriguing that I found myself not wanting it to end. the only issue I found in the story was the final conflict between the couple that lasted until the epilogue. Why would you wait until the last chapter to finish the conflict between the couple, the epilogue no less. I found myself interested in the layers of grief that this book portrayed. The narrator did good with this book. I however won't lisson to this again, I hate that the conflict between lasted so long. The fact that the epilogue was used for fixing the couples issues instead of showing character growth upset me. This book would of been amazing if it was give more chapters and gotten rid of that last conflict. The last conflict felt unnecessary and could have been taken out to focus more on the couples relationship growth.

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.