Book Review: A Sticky End by James Lear

Though I have been posting poetry each Tuesday, I chose to do so on Friday this week for a special reason.  Instead of a wintery poem today, I have decided to post a book review.

Best friends and sometimes lovers Edward "Mitch" Mitchell and Harry "Boy" Morgan have been in terrible jams before — their adventures of murder, mystery, and unstoppable sex have made The Back Passage and The Secret Tunnel international bestsellers. In A Sticky End, Mitch must face the possibility that Boy is involved in the chain of events that led to the suicide of his own colleague and secret paramour, Frank Bartlett. To absolve Boy, Mitch races around London finding clues while bedding the many men eager to lend a hand — or more. The policemen, working class gigolos, steam room bathers, embezzlers, and blackmailers that Mitch comes across create a tasty mystery and satisfying erotic romp.

If you are not familiar with the horny detective Edward "Mitch" Mitchell, then I suggest beginning with The Back Passage and The Secret Tunnel before reading A Sticky End.  However, here are a few quotes from the book that should tantalize you enough to want to read these books by James Lear.
Mitch Mitchel on his detecting method:

Holmes has his fiddle, Poirot his liqueurs—I have cock.  We all have our methods.

His libido:

I had to stop groping in the dark.  He who gropes in the dark tends to find things he wasn’t looking for—and, looking back over the last 36 hours, I’d found more cocks, asses, and mouths than was altogether plausible.  The one thing most likely  to distract me from a case is, of course, sex—and sex seemed to rear its head at every corner.  Was this a coincidence?  It often seems to me, when I reflect on my experiences, that whenever I am close in proximity to crime, to murder, sexual opportunities arise with far greater frequency.  Why is this?  Is my libido suddenly exaggerated by the nearness of death?  Is it, as the Freudians would have us believe, evidence of the close relationship between Eros and Thanatos? Or is it simply that criminals know exactly how to keep me occupied by throwing sexually attractive men in my way whenever I get too close for comfort?  Whatever, the reason, my three encounters with suspicious death have coincided with peaks in sexual activity.  I will leave further analysis to the experts.

On bottoming:

My friends and regular readers will know that, on the whole, I tend to take the active role in these encounters—partly, I suppose, through personal preference, but also because most men, in my experience, are so eager to take what they’re not used to being given that I have very little choice in the matter.  Nature has equipped me for the job—I’ve got plenty to go around, and enough stamina to keep up with demand, even when, in the last 24 hours, men were lining up with their asses open.  But there comes a time in every man’s life when he wants nothing more than to lie on his back with his legs in the air and take an enormous hard prick up his rectum, and that time had come for me.

Lear’s erotic fiction is a joy to read, whether it is the Mitch Mitchell Mysteries, or any of his other novels.  One thing to remember though, unless you have a Kindle or other e-reader, these are probably books that you would not want to take out in public to read (at least in most places), because nearly every one of Lear’s novels has a naked man on the cover.  But nobody does a book cover like James Lear.
JAMES LEAR is the nom de plume of prolific and acclaimed novelist, Rupert Smith. He lives in London and is the 2008 Winner of Erotic Awards "Best Writer".