Hostile Ground

March 17, 2014
Witt (Finding Master Right) and Voinov (Gold Digger) team up for an intensely thrilling romance. Seattle cop Mahir Hussain goes deep undercover to bring down a crime ring at a nightclub, and he quickly finds himself deep into something else: a dangerous, passionate affair with David Ridley, the club’s head of security and the man responsible for ferreting out snitches and narcs. The two men have an increasingly sultry series of encounters, both in and out of the office, though Mahir knows that David has killed other undercover cops. When Mahir’s young nephew accidentally gets involved in the case, Mahir has to find a way to bring down the bad guys fast—and has to decide how far he can trust David. The sincere familial affection between Mahir and his nephew lends a delightful depth to a thoroughly sexy tale.

May 1, 2014
When Arab American detective Mahir Hussein agrees to go undercover in a Seattle nightclub run by Gene Lombardi, a notorious drug and prostitution kingpin, he doesn't expect to fall for the gangster's security chief, but he does. Fortunately, Mahir quickly figures out that David Ridley isn't a gangster but a fellow detective infiltrating the gang. Together, they discover that Lombardi is using teenage boys as mules to carry cocaine to his runners, but each boy only makes three deliveries before he disappears. Where do the boys go? Are they killed? Although the assignment is bad enough, it becomes worse when Mahir's nephew is kicked out of his home after he announces that he's gay. Trying to shelter the boy while staying undercover turns into a nearly impossible task, which becomes nightmarish when the nephew decides to follow Mahir to work and is forcefully conscripted by Lombardi as a mule. Witt and Voinov give readers not only a suspenseful ride into Seattle's underbelly but also a satisfying romance, with explicit gay sex scenes between two hardened, macho detectives.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)