The Bruise-Black Sky & Death’s Ink-Black Shadow by John Wiltshire

Narrated by Gary Furlong

The Bruise-Black Sky

Following on from being stranded in Siberia and family betrayal (The Bridge of Silver Wings), and the undercover and amnesia storylines of This Other Country, the plot of this fifth More Heat Than the Sun book is a bit tame by comparison. As always, the real meat of these novels is found in the relationship between Nik and Ben, but the plot used to frame it this time round – a murder/mystery – isn’t very interesting and the reveal is both confusing and unsatisfactory.

Note: This is an ongoing series in which the central relationship develops from book to book; as such, this is not the place to start, and there will be spoilers for earlier books in this reivew.

The events of This Other Country have led to a shift in the relationship dynamic between Ben and Nik and Nik finds himself in the unpleasant, and previously largely unknown, situation of often being on the back foot. Nik has done everything he can to maintain the upper hand, fearing the intense vulnerability that would ensue should Ben realise just how completely and uttely in love with him he is, but when The Bruise-Black Sky opens, things are different, and Ben is taking delight in confounding Nik and doing things his way for a change. Things are good between them, though, until yet another of Nik’s long-held secrets surfaces unexpectedly – and it hits Ben hard, especially as he had really believed that, at long last, Nik had told him everything. Nik, of course, sees things completely differently; this information is – and has long been – of no importance to him whatsoever, and therefore, there was no need for Ben to know it. But he’s badly miscalculated, and Ben is deeply hurt.

The plot of The Bruise-Black Sky sees Ben agreeing to take on a movie role in a biopic about a popular young actor who died recently – supposedly by his own hand. It will mean a couple of months away – on location in New Zealand and then in the US – and, still smarting from what he’s just learned, Ben says yes, attracted by the prospect of some time away from Nik.

But of course, nothing is ever straighforward for these two, and soon, Ben discovers that Oliver Whitehouse had received death threats – and that a new one directed at him has now been received (which the crew was told to keep quiet about.) A new security team is hired, one of whom, a scary, taciturn Russian, is assigned to Ben as his personal bodyguard – and yes, of course it’s Nik, who has moved heaven and earth to get himself hired so he can protect his man and find out who is behind the threats. But honestly, this part of the story is pretty lacklustre; there’s not much plot, too much sex, the pacing is stodgy and the reveal comes completely out of the blue.

Once Ben and Nik are back home, there’s a development I’m ambivalent about:

I’ve said before that these books aren’t for the faint of heart, not just because of the violence and the rough (still lubeless!) sex, but also because there are some really outdated attitudes on display. The casual misogyny that crops up from time to time is very noticeable, and then there’s this:

By the end, Ben and Nik are on a much more even footing, and facing some life changes as a result of (spoiler #1, above). I love them – Nik, especially, is so complex, so deeply damaged and so intensely loving when it comes to Ben – but they drive me nuts at times, with their inability – AFTER TWELVE YEARS TOGETHER – to have a proper conversation, and the way they still manage to misread and misunderstand each other on an epic scale. The ruling principle of Nik’s life is to keep Ben safe, and to keep him, as far as possible, from being ‘tainted’ by all the darkness in his life, the terrible things he’s lived through, and the terrible things he’s done. Ben thinks he gets it, but he doesn’t, not really; he’s too optimistic (so Nik thinks) to really be able to comprehend the true depths of depravity to which Nik was forced to sink. But I confess, the ‘I’m not telling you for your own good’ thing is getting a little tiresome by now; Ben’s a grown man – he’s former military and former SAS, so knows how to look after himself – and Nik needs to start treating him as one. In the end, The Bruise-Black Sky feels like mid-series filler; Ben and Nik are still very much them, their bantering is as much fun as ever, and I liked seeing Ben getting the upper hand a bit more often, but this isn’t going down as a series favourite.

Death’s Ink Black Shadow (Note: Spoilers for book five ahead.)

The theme of Nik trying to shield Ben comes back with a vengeance in this book, which I enjoyed a lot more than the previous one. It’s much more relationship focused – no plane crashes, kidnappings or natural disasters – and the author does a fantastic job of creating an air of foreboding right from the start, building an air of impending doom slowly but inexorably as Nik plots and Ben remains mostly and wilfully oblivious.

When Death’s Ink Black Shadow opens, Nik and Ben are happily ensconced in coupledom when a knock at the front door heralds the appearance of a most unexpected visitor – after which, things promptly turn to shit. Knowing how this series works by now, listeners won’t be at all surprised to learn the identity of this mysterious visitor, but his arrival puts Nik into damage-control mode and he once again takes steps to distance himself from Ben as a way of protecting him. Nothing he tried before worked, because Ben just won’t believe him when Nik tries to tell him something terrible is about to happen, and now, in desperation, he comes up with probably the most despicable scheme imaginable to get Ben to leave him. It works – until Ben is able to set his utter devastation aside and look at things rationally, but even after confronting Nik and calling bullshit, he feels as though Nik is slipping away from him.

Most of this story is told in Ben’s PoV, so we get to see Nik’s actions through his eyes, and Ben’s interpretation of them. This last is key; Ben is an unreliable narrator because he can’t or won’t see the bigger picture Nik is trying to warn him about – as their ward Emilia tells Ben late on in the story, he asks Nik questions, but doesn’t listen to his answers.

And while Ben won’t ditch his rose-tinted glasses, it’s also true that Nik has lost sight of who Ben is, seeing the “easy-going, happy to love and be loved, slightly vain, very spoilt boyfriend he’d created” instead of the badass warrior he’s always been – Nik’s equal, two halves of a whole who are infinitely better together than apart. Both men have to make some serious readjustments in this book, and although those adjustments bring much heartache there’s a sense by the end that they might just finally be on the same page. I did love the scene near the end when Ben organises a gathering of people Nik has helped through Angel (his charitable foundation), to remind him how much good he’s done and to try to help him to focus on that instead of all the bad things in his past.

Among the adjustments Ben and Nik are faced with is Ben’s unexpected fatherhood. At the end of The Bruise Black Sky, they made the decision that baby Molly Rose (who is five months old) should remain with her maternal grandparents for the time being. Neither man has the faintest idea what to do with an infant and the life they live doesn’t exactly lend itself to parenthood; as it later turns out, with Babushka – a former midwife – on hand when Molly Rose comes to visit, they can have all of the fun stuff of having a baby around without all the not-fun stuff! (I rolled my eyes SO HARD at this – but I’m choosing to believe the author had her tongue firmly in her cheek when she wrote that bit!) Some of the funniest parts of the story take place when we see these two big, strong men who have survived being shot, tortured, buried alive, half-drowned and god knows what else, being completely clueless around a small person. We don’t see a great deal of the baby – for which I was grateful – although I have to say she seems awfully advanced for her age; crawling at five months and pulling herself up on the furniture at seven months? In her defence, however, she makes Nik laugh – something that happens so rarely, Ben is hard pressed to remember the last time he did it!

The cast of regulars is slowly expanding; Radulf, Tim and Squeezy have been joined by Babushka and Emilia, and now we have the aptly-named Miles Toogood (an extremely precocious pupil at Emilia’s school) whose interactions with both Nik and Ben are priceless, and Peyton, the hacker from Louisiana Nik met in the previous book.

I don’t know what I can say about Gary Furlong and his performances in these books that I haven’t already said elsewhere, several times over. His range of character voices and the variety of accents he can produce and maintain convincingly puts him firmly in the very top tier of narrators in this genre (and many others, I should imagine.) He navigates his way through a fairly large cast with ease, switching seamlessly between a number of different accents, making sure the portrayals of recurring characters match those in earlier books and finding yet more ways to interpret new characters so no two sound alike. Best of all is the way he so obviously gets Ben and Nik; as in the previous books, they go to hell and back in these stories and he’s with them every step of the way, every emotion expertly rendered, from sorrow to anger to tenderness to passion to joy to wherever on the gamut they need to be.

Death’s Ink Black Shadow is one of the best books in the series, more of a psychological thriller/drama than an action adventure yarn, and it puts the More Heat Than the Sun series firmly back on track. When we leave Ben and Nik, they’re in a good place and, in a way, back at the beginning, but with twelve years of experience and knowledge of each other to help them going forward. But with three more books in the series to go, I can’t imagine that they’re going to be allowed to rest in their hard-won togetherness for very long!

Caz