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A Friend in the Fire (Auden and O’Callaghan 2)
Gregory Ashe and C.S. Poe
Emporium Press, 2021
Five stars

Once again, the collaboration of two rather different writers has produced something that appeals to me greatly. Sam Auden and Rufus O’Callaghan are a marvelously mismatched, messed-up pair, as the unsatisfying (but logical) denouement of the first book in this series demonstrated. Ashe’s love of harshness, mixed with Poe’s love of gentleness, works with these two, because while both have lived lives of insecurity and violence, their souls both yearn for the opposite of that. They are beat up, but they aren’t hardened. .

This book starts off three months after the first left off—with Sam on the road again and Rufus doing his thing—but not very happily. In fact, they’re both miserable, not sleeping well, regretting the absence of the other. When a strange note drags Rufus out of his lethargy and nearly gets him stabbed, he finally reaches out to Sam who hightails it back to the crowded, overwhelming, gritty city that Rufus has (we discover) never once left in his lifetime. Their awkward reunion is contrasted with the immense relief they feel. They sleep well for the first time in months. Just sleep.

This is a high-stress story, filled with brutal deaths and bad behavior. Oddly enough, it is also filled with dry humor, as Rufus and Sam re-establish their rapport and begin to understand how much they really need each other. The banter is weirdly funny, as if somehow Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn were a couple of trampled-down 30-something gay men struggling not to be killed as they try to get an uncaring police department to pay attention. I loved it. OK, maybe it’s only easy for ME to picture that.

It is a gripping page-turner and a tender rapprochement between two wounded souls. What an odd mixture that works so very well. There seems to be another chapter in this series coming, and I can’t say I’m not looking forward to it.