'Pretty Pretty Boys' by Gregory Ashe
- Reed
- May 15
- 3 min read
Updated: May 26
Author: Gregory Ashe
Rating: A
Vibe: Small-town murder mystery meets slow-burn gay tension—with secrets, violence, and a complicated partnership simmering just beneath the surface.
Quick Take: Taut, emotionally layered, and surprisingly tender, this is a mystery that knows how to balance plot and character without flinching from either.
I first read Pretty Pretty Boys while sitting on a beach in Hawaii, cocktail in hand, sun on my face. And I couldn’t have picked a better vacation read. It’s a moody procedural wrapped around a quietly compelling emotional arc, full of longing, buried secrets, and a history that refuses to stay buried.
The story follows Emery Hazard, a powerlifting brute of a detective with a moral code and a whole lot of baggage, who returns to his rural Missouri hometown after being forced out of the St. Louis PD. Wahredua is the site of his worst memories—relentless bullying, a closeted first love who died by suicide—and now, it’s also where he’s assigned a new partner: John-Henry Somerset. Somers. The golden boy who made Hazard’s teenage years hell.
Their first case together was a burned body, a missing activist boyfriend, and a web of hateful small-town politics. The mystery works—it’s above average for the genre, with enough twists to keep you engaged but grounded in emotional stakes. I found the pacing strong overall, though there were moments where the brooding lingered a beat too long. That tendency becomes more noticeable in later books, but here it’s still under control.
What really elevates the novel is the relationship between Hazard and Somers. Their dynamic is thorny, emotionally layered, and always believable. Ashe lets them exist in that in-between space—attraction laced with resentment, shared history that’s more wound than memory. I wanted resolution by the end, but I respect the choice not to force it. The tension between them earns its slow burn. There’s a scene where they nearly sleep together that’s one of the most arresting in the book—raw, intimate, and edged with both desire and pain.
I also loved how Ashe flips the expected emotional roles. Hazard is the out gay man, physically imposing and tightly controlled. Somers is the prettier, more gregarious one—still sorting through his own identity, still chasing the approval of people who never really saw him. It’s a dynamic you don’t often see, and that contrast becomes a vehicle for exploring queerness and masculinity in a way that feels fresh and grounded.
The tone reminds me a little of Joseph Hansen’s Deathclaims, but with more psychological depth. Wahredua itself becomes a kind of antagonist—an oppressive, conservative backdrop that pushes every character’s tension to the surface.
As much as Pretty Pretty Boys is a murder mystery, it’s also a story about aftermath—of violence, of desire, of the choices we made as teenagers and the people we became in response. It’s about returning to the scene of your own damage and realizing that the past doesn’t offer closure so much as confrontation. Ashe writes with a clear understanding of how queerness shapes identity, not just in terms of love or trauma, but in the liminal spaces where the two overlap. This isn’t just a whodunit. It’s a character study disguised as a procedural, and one that left me thinking about all the ways we try—and often fail—to outrun who we used to be.
