I read one of my first thrillers with Better the Devil

Fun fact! I’ve met Erik J Brown. That is relevant, since I’m talking about Better The Devil by the aforementioned Brown. But I got to meet him when he was doing an event in London at, I believe, The Common Press Bookshop, which is a queer bookshop. I’d very much recommend giving it a visit if you find yourself in London. I will say, I tend to go to Gay’s the Word more, but that’s just because of ease of location. But Brown was doing an event for his second novel, The Only Light Left Burning, and I think I was going to be in London for a gig or something, and the event was the night before, so I decided to go to London a day earlier so I could go.

The blurb says desperate to escape a family who will never accept him, a queer runaway in police custody borrow the identity of a boy who vanished years ago: Nate Beaumont. But when Nate’s family come to take their son home, he’s trapped in a web of lies. Then he meets Miles – the cite, clever and true-crime-obsessed boy-next-door – who knows more than it seems. Unexpectedly, Miles agrees to help, in exchange for exposing the truth about what happened years ago to his childhood friend. As their investigation turns dangerous, their feelings turn real. Time is running out. They don’t know who to trust. And someone is watching who wants to keep this case cold. Will they find the missing boy or find each other?

I found it interesting that Nate never actually names himself. He doesn’t refer to himself by any name until he ends up getting arrested for trying to steal a can of food. He ends up taking Nate’s name when he’s in the police station and sees a poster with an AI generated picture of Nate of what he’d presumed to look like at sixteen. And since our character Nate figures he looks like the Nate on the poster, he steals the name. The original Nate has been missing for ten years, which is why he presumes he can get away with it. This then leads into the Beaumonts, Nate’s family, swooping in, and taking him in, which they’d obviously do, since they figure that’s their son. But it ends up being Miles that figures out Nate isn’t Nate, only because he baselessly accuses Nate of not being Nate, and Nate ends up caving.

This was a really interesting concept. I tend not to read thrillers. Really, my only requirement is queer. Like sorry, I’m not that bothered about seeing straight people in this situation, but queer people? Let me eat that up. And I think because of that, I’m probably more receptive to some of the tropes that’ll come along with the genre that I’m probably not familiar with. Take romance, for example, since I read so much of that, I’m more familiar with tropes and will pick up on things, whereas with mystery and thriller – like this book – I’m less so. I was more than happy while reading this to just let myself be told the story and not try and figure it out, even if there were a couple of times I suspected characters. Like, I’d just sit and read and let what happened happen. That’s definitely what happened, like, things would be brought up towards the end of the book that would link back to things that had happened earlier, and I’d be thinking, “Oh yeah, I remember that”, but at the time I’d not really think anything of it. I won’t spoil specifically what it was, but Nate visits the dentist at one point, and Valencia is his dentist, and when he leaves he mentions how badly his mouth hurts. He ends up chalking this up to the fact he’s just not been to the dentist in a long time, until you get to a reveal of something at the end of the book, and then this dentist visit with Valencia cleaning Nate’s teeth isn’t just that. It’s an actual point in the book.

I think the best character was Gramma Sharon. Like, that was mother, literally in the case of her being Valencia’s mother. But she was mother! Like escaped the khia asylum type mother. While everyone in this book sucked for one reason or another, I will stand up and say Sharon did not – even if she did. I will be accepting no Sharon slander in this house. If you are here, you are now legally a member of Sharon Nation. Sharonnators, stand up! I think in the end, it was really only Sharon that didn’t do anything all that deplorable. Valencia I can absolutely forgive for what happened throughout the book. I don’t think she didn’t anything that bad, she was just a mother who loved her son. Nate, too. I can forgive. The bad things that he did, they were out of necessity. Does he spend the entire book lying to just about everyone, pretending to be Nate? Yes. But I’m not blind and could see that he did it because he had no choice. He says this in the book, too. He’s lying to everyone because he doesn’t have any other options that would have kept him safe. His lying was keeping him fed, and a roof over his head after he ran away from his biological parents who loved him nowhere near or as properly as the Beaumonts did. I wasn’t a fan of Marcus, Nate’s dad, he had a temper and exploded at Nate a few times over things that were accidents or not Nate’s fault. So, even if he did love Nate – definitely not like Valencia did – he still put me off.

Now I’m stuck, because in terms of actual thriller, I don’t feel like I can say it’s good or not since, like I said, I don’t read thrillers. The book definitely gagged me, but again, that might be because I don’t read thrillers, but it was also gag-worthy in my opinion, especially once everything started getting revealed. When you get to the point where you’re starting to find out what happened to the real Nate, there was one core detail that I called correctly and felt very proud of myself for getting right. Still, I enjoyed the book, and nothing really hit the don’t piss me off button. I’d say read it, I had fun.

Okay, bye!