Dangerous Devotions by AD Penhall

Title: Dangerous Devotions

Author: AD Penhall

Genre: Crime

Publisher: Clan Destine Press

Published: 1^st July 2023

Format: Paperback

Pages: 315

Price: $36.95

Synopsis: A beautiful city on a glittering harbour,
where not everything is tourist brochure perfect.

Sydney – where beauty is in the eye of the beholder
and where even the strangest desires can be met.

Blind barrister Tom Challinor’s plans for a well-earned week off are dashed by an attempted murder linked to a Sydney escort agency.

Sonya and her sassy friend Avril are employees in that niche-market agency where the workers are all people with disability: amputees, chair users, or people of short stature.

Their eager customers style themselves ‘devotees’.

As Tom investigates an underworld of desire, entitlement and exploitation, the menace of predatory passion clamps tight around Avril and Sonya, bizarrely mutilated dolls start turning up at a women’s refuge, and young women start to disappear.

The first in the Harbour City Mysteries, Dangerous Devotions is inclusive, subversive and enthralling. The debut crime novel by psychologist and disability advocate A D Penhall, is a riveting insight into the world of sex workers with niche specialties.

~*~

*This book was sent to me for review by Sisters in Crime*

Tom Challinor is a blind barrister in Sydney, keen for a break from his hectic work when he’s pulled into a case to investigate an attempted murder linked to an escort agency, but there’s more to the case than meets the eye. It is a niche-market agency – disabled sex workers – amputees, wheelchair users, or people of short stature whose customers call themselves ‘devotees’ – who also see people who dress up as disabled people, according to the author’s statement on the press release. And as Tom is drawn into the case by those he knows from his life and career, and those who are linked to the disability community, he uncovers deliveries of mutilated dolls to a women’s shelter as more and more disabled sex workers disappear – and Tom and his colleagues and friends start to wonder if the cases are linked, and if there is more to the events and cases than they know about.

At the same time, the stories of Avril and Sonya, disabled sex workers from Lebanon, Warren, Tom’s friend, and Ian, a carer in a disabled group home come together with a range of other peripheral characters – Julia, Clare, Tom’s ex, and a multitude of other people who have links to the disabled community to help tell the story and create divergent avenues for the story to head down. Each one has different attitudes and understandings of disability. Avril, Sonya, and Tom are the key disabled characters who drive much if the narrative, showing that there is a spectrum of disability and what disabled people can do and want to do, what they do with the agency they have. In stark comparison, are characters like Warren and Ian who aren’t that sympathetic to disabled people but they’re not the kind of people who’d be violent – they have a keen sense of justice and underneath, I did feel like they cared about disabled people in their care, even if their exteriors didn’t always show this. Julia represented the character with conflicting feelings about it all, whose story is revealed slowly and carefully throughout the novel.

 Dangerous Devotions reveals a range of attitudes to disability and disabled people and explores a dark world that tries to take advantage of them and deny them agency. These attitudes are the ones that much of society has about disabled people – the assumptions about what disabled can and can’t do, or should and shouldn’t do permeate the story, driving the narrative on one side, whilst also showing that disabled people can participate in a range of activities as long as things are made accessible for them, and that every disabled person will interact with the world differently. At the same time, it advocates for giving disabled people support and choice – to let them decide what they want to do but also acknowledging when they need help. And it also shows that there will always be negative attitudes towards disabled people, but books like this show that these stereotypes and assumptions are not true and shouldn’t be used to make decisions for disabled people.

In terms of the mystery, it was well-thought out and executed, and moving through a few different perspectives allowed the tension and mystery to grow and expand, and the little clues dropped at times seemed innocuous, until Tom and Julia started putting things together throughout the novel. As characters who were not police, this made the story interesting – because they had to work within different parameters and work with the information they could get. It was a really interesting book that showed a different side to many places in Sydney – a darker side, a side that perhaps not many people think about or know about. I think this book starts off slowly but then it starts to pick up – the tension needs to grow to make the plot work, and it was done exceptionally well – I got to a point where I found myself reading as much in one sitting as possible to find out what happens. It is that kind of book – and I hope crime fiction lovers will enjoy it.