Loving the Monster

"Someone arranged him." Roman Voss has spent twelve years being the person no one wants in the room - until the body is already there. A forensic consultant with a gift for finding the thing no one thought to lie about, he‘s been sent to embed with a Cold Case Task Force under orders he only half-understands, tracking a pattern of deaths that look natural and aren‘t. The work is familiar. The unit is not. Eli Crave is the unit‘s forensic specialist: precise, private, and impossible to read before he chooses to be readable. Over weeks of shared crime scenes and parallel case work, Roman begins building two documents simultaneously - the official investigation, and something he has no professional framework for. A record. An accumulation. Forty-one pages of evidence about a man he cannot stop watching. And then the pattern resolves. Roman finds his author. The case is complete, submission-ready, and would end Eli Crave‘s life as he knows it. He doesn‘t submit it. Loving the Monster is a slow-burn literary romance set inside a cold case unit, where two methodical, deeply private men spend eighteen weeks learning to see each other with the same forensic attention they give every crime scene - and discovering that being seen completely is the most terrifying thing either of them has ever faced. It is a book about the architecture of grief, the cost of institutional justice, the specific patience of a man who has decided to stay, and what it means to hand someone the thing that could destroy you and call it a gift. For readers who want their romance earned: every page of tension is paid for.