My Heartache Cowboy should come with a warning label on it.I loved it, but it's a sequel that feels like a big departure from My Cowboy heart, the book that precedes it.ZAM has taken the supporting characters from the last book and written them with lives that extend well beyond the confines of the J-Bar, both in breadth and scope. Jimmy's story is too raw to qualify as a romance. He's a closeted alcoholic about to hit rock bottom and about to lose his only friend Eddie. He's mean, crass and confused. Jimmy is so far in a state of denial that he's pitched a tent in the capitol city.Jimmy's been in love with Eddie, yet unable to admit it even to himself for so long that he's managed to convince himself that there's nothing between them. They can't admit to the attraction and only act on it as two-thirds of a no-strings menage-a-trois that manages to be both hot and heartbreakingly sad at the same time. There's a lot of thought about what makes 'intimacy' in this story, and the menage scenes illuminate both the connection or lack thereof that happens when three people have sex with each other. This book is written from Jimmy's perspective and it's hard to be in his head some times. It speaks volumes for ZAM's skill as an author that we sometimes know how Eddie feels even when Jimmy seems ignorant or at best uninformed. There's no 'big misunderstanding' that drives Jimmy and Eddie apart in this book. Jimmy is a drunk fuck up and he does fucked up things that hurt people, and while it's tough to go along for the ride, for me it was worth the tears. The synopsis lacks any mention of the presence of a threesome for a large part of the book, and considering how upset some mono-identified readers get when any hint of more than 2 people engaged in erotic endeavours enters their books, I think a warning would be the smart thing.Me, of course, I don’t care; bring on the multi-men sexcapades. In fact I really enjoyed the multi-partner elements here, because I love unusual families, and Don certainly brings that in spades. I also like it when not all sex is tied up with romance because for many people sex, intimacy and romance are not necessarily linked, and I like to see that acknowledged in genre fiction.I also liked the depiction of Jim’s alcoholism; his denial, the ridiculous test, the realization that Eddie could not be his higher power, and that he had to do it for himself. It’s all handled with minimal preachiness, and a lot of insight.On the downside:Jim didn’t feel "authentic" to me. As an alcoholic, yes, but as a cowboy, not so much. I never felt a cohesive voice from him. He was interesting enough, but I didn’t get close to him because I didn’t feel who he really was. I think this might be a failure of the author to write fully realized blue collar characters — with Malloy she could get away with it because he had a college education, but Jim came from an uneducated background, couldn’t read well, and didn’t care to improve himself. Yet he didn’t sound like that — which made the whole upset about the AA book feel "off" to me.And alas the same is true for Eddie. He remained something of an outline, not a whole person. 15 years in the closet, secretly in love with Jim, and we know nothing about what that must have been like.The person we got to know best was Don, and that’s just not good when we’re talking romance and commitment between the two other main characters. Don upstaged Eddie. And I am not actually certain I believe his equanimity with the status quo — he says if he called Eddie during calving, Eddie wouldn’t give him the time of day, but Don himself drops everything not just for Eddie, but for Eddie’s love interest to boot. It just seems a bit too altruistic, and while I am not at all bothered by him not wanting to change his relationship with his family, there was something here that didn’t quite ring true. And, you know, there is nothing wrong with calling what he feels for Eddie "love", even if it’s not the sort of love that wants to get married and ride off into the sunset together.Structurally I feel there was a bit too much back and forth between two poles without increased drama during the middle of the book, but it wasn’t egregious. What was egregious, was that the commitment (with rings!) between Eddie and Jim happened off-screen. Don’t do that. I’d have been happier with no formal commitment yet, because frankly, Jim had a ways to go to prove himself. But a throw-away sentence during the epilogue which focussed on Jim was the wrong thing to do.I hated the epilogue. I thought Eddie and Don would have caught onto that Jim had to do some things for himself, and to my mind forced reunions with blood family are a total crap shoot, and not the business of third parties to organize — I can’t find polite words for how I’d react to something like that. I was blindsided by it — I thought maybe Don would gift Jim Tatters, since there was what felt like foreshadowing (and now it feels more like the epilogue was written much later than the book itself and what felt like foreshadowing was just clumsy repetition).Lastly, wow, Penguin, you should be ashamed of yourself. I’ve read fan fiction lately that was better proofread and copy edited than this. Nobody even let a damn spellchecker run over the manuscript, and I doubt a competent set of human eyes and brain read over it because there were some ghastly misspellings and grammatical errors, worse than in the first book (which also had its share). What, renowned publishers now jump on the m/m wagon because it looks lucrative, but you don’t even fork out for a copy editor? Sheesh.
