About Criss Cross
Written by Jordan Castillo Price
93 pages / 41000 words
ISBN: 978-1-934166-34-5, 1-934166-34-0
Available file types - html, lit, pdf, prc, paperback (with Criss-Cross in Psy Cop: Partners)
Vic figures life is pretty good. He's got his lover, Jacob. He's got some time off to go fishing, and his new partner in the Paranormal Investigation Team buys the coffee. Of course when things seem to be going great, that's when it really hits the fan.
When he starts to see ghosts around every corner, including one who actually manages to touch him, things go very wrong, resulting in a trip to his doctor, who tells him he's got some problems that make doing his job very difficult. His friends are telling Jacob he has to leave for Vic to get better, sex is starting to get dangerous, and Vic's psychic abilities are getting out of hand. Can he and Jacob figure out what's happening in time to save Vic from the people who want to use him for their own ends?
If you loved Among the Living, you won't be able to put this one down! Get your hands on Criss Cross today!
Review
JL Jensen, author of Prospecting, writes: I have been waiting for the sequel to “Among the Living” by Jordan Castillo Price, so I jumped on the chance to review it (and read it before it was published).
When the story starts, Vic is out fishing on the Calumet River with his retired ex-partner, Maurice, and his life is good. He and Jacob are living together and he has a new partner, Roger, who buys the coffee. Vic starts to wonder if he should tell Maurice that he’s gay, but when he looks into the water and sees dead people--a lot of dead people. When he gets home, Jacob’s still working, witnessing an execution, so he gives Lisa Guitierrez, his partner after Maurice until she was discovered to be psychic, a call at the training center she’s at in San Diego. He gets her voice mail, so as he waits for her to call back, Vic tunes his TV to and unused channel -- he uses the static as visual white noise -- and he starts to see ghostly shapes in the static. When Jacob finally gets home, the sex is great, but the next morning, Vic sees scratches on Jacob’s thighs and is shocked to discover he’d put them there. When he gets to work, he and his new partner are assigned to a cold case. While they’re at lunch, Vic sees a ghost that starts to follow him and is shocked when he actually feels it touch him, something that has never happened before. As they work on the case they wind up at a river, where Vic is swarmed by ghosts who look like they’ve been scalped, and finally freaks out. He’s taken to the only clinic in the area equipped to deal with mediums -- taking a man who sees ghosts to a hospital is a bad idea. There he has to deal with a new Paranormal Psychiatrist (he’s told that his normal doctor is in Japan) who does all sorts of blood tests, tells him that he has an inflamed liver, and takes him off of Auracel, the dampening drug he uses when things get too intense. Jacob picks Vic up from the clinic and when they get home, Jacob asks Vic if he knows why Lisa would call and tell him to leave.
Can things get even worse? I’ll leave that for the readers to discover, but along the way we get to meet Jacob’s ex-lover and learn more about Vic’s gifts.
I found myself unable to stop reading this story and I know I missed a lot of details during my first read-through because I had to know what happened next. Criss-Cross drew me into the Psy-Cop world and wouldn’t let me go until the end. Yes, Vic and Jacob have wonderfully hot sex, but there’s also mystery and intrigue and a roller coaster ride of a story, which ties up most of the loose ends but leaves just enough for another story (which I hope the author is writing...). Criss-Cross kept me guessing until the end and if you buy this story, make sure you don’t have anything else to do for the rest of the day because you won’t be able to put it down!
Sample
I slipped the phone into my pocket and headed back toward my apartment. Jacob and I didn’t live together, not exactly. It was just that he was staying with me until he found a house or a condo. I’d killed this soul-eating incubus in his bedroom, and even though every psychic Jacob knew told him there was no trace of the thing left, he still refused to sleep there.
It’d been a few weeks, but since we both knew Jacob was actually looking at places -- and because he thought my apartment looked like a hospital room in a charity ward -- we’d never begun feeling too domestic together.
I parked my car, took three flights of stairs two at a time, threw open my front door and flipped on the kitchen light. I went through the living room, bedroom and bathroom and did the same, until the whole place incandesced. Everything in the apartment is white, from the cheap landlord-painted walls to the furniture to the bent plastic miniblinds. When my eyes settled on things that were not white, they invariably turned out to be shadows, nothing more. And that was the way I liked it.
I swallowed all three Auracel tablets at once, and sank down on the futon in the living room. And then I remembered: I’d meant to pick up rubbers on the way home, but in a few minutes I’d be flying too high to drive. It wasn’t like Jacob had left a big note on the fridge that said “buy condoms” or anything. In fact, he hadn’t said a word about taking anything further than blowjobs after the first time we’d spent the whole night together. It seemed like every day I set off with the intention of bringing home the goods, and then totally forgot about it. I thought it was fairly conspicuous that Jacob never picked any up, either. Since he’s the poster child for organizational skills, I can only assume he was leaving the timing up to me. I’m not exactly sure how buying condoms – or not -- turned into my issue. Maybe because all the issues in our relationship seemed to be mine.