Forsaking Truth (McCullough Mountain, #5)
Lydia Michaels
An eye-opening exploration of small town life and adversity through an LGBT lens. Bestselling author, Lydia Michaels, delivers a masterpiece of emotion in an unforgettable male-male romance that all readers will love. When Luke McCullough’s athletic potential is diminished by a field injury, his pride pays the price. Returning to his small town a broken man, the long road to recovery seems dreary and overshadowed by opportunities lost, until he meets Tristan Hughes. Tristan came to Center County to escape his past and start anew, but nothing prepared him for Luke. Intrigued, Tristan cautiously gets to know this formidable man, and falls head over heels for the vulnerable soul hiding behind all that muscled intensity and drive. Luke has never been interested in men. When he can’t get Tristan out of his head, he fights the inevitable. Stolen glances lead to heated encounters, followed by punishing regret, but Luke’s inability to face the truth of who he really is could cost him the only happiness he’s ever known. Bestselling author, Lydia Michaels, has created an unforgettable family saga bursting with sizzling secrets and scandalous moments in this award winning series, McCullough Mountain, where each story can be read as a stand alone!
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**I was provided an electronic copy of this novel post-publication from the publisher through NetGalley.**
Actual rating: 3.5
Please seek content warnings for this work.
Lydia Michaels presents the fifth installment in the McCullough Mountain series, Broken Man. Readers follow Luke McCullough whose professional football dreams were cut short by injury. When he returns home, he meets Tristan. Tristan followed Luke's cousin home from college after graduation, unsafe in his hometown after his father learning that Tristan is gay. Luke has never been interested in men, but he is absolutely interested in Tristan. While fifth in the series, this book is able to be read as a standalone without any issue.
I have mixed feelings about this work, largely due to the ending. Michaels' character work is strong and the difficulties that Tristan and Luke face are reasonable and well-written. For me, a lot of their growth both separately and as a pair seemed natural and realistically messy.
However, I believe the final conflict's violence was gratuitous and served no purpose to their narrative. It did not further develop their relationship beyond the potential bond-building that overcoming any hardship produces. Beyond that, this violence was so late in the story that Tristan and Luke were already pretty solid in their feelings for one another, qualms and disagreements aside. In addition, by incorporating this scene so very near the end, readers barely have time to emotionally recover from it whereas had it been earlier, there would have been a gradual build for recovery rather than a simple moving on. As such, I strongly feel it would have been better to leave this out.
Overall, I did still enjoy my time with this work and would not hesitate to pick up other works by this author.
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