Intrusion by Charlotte Stein is an unusual novel. It’s part romantic suspense, part moody, intense contemporary. It almost defies categorization. Both Sarah and I read and it we had a lot to say.

Intrusion opens with Beth, our heroine and narrator, worried that her creepy neighbor Noah Gideon Grant has stolen her dog. Noah never leaves his slightly decrepit house, and there’s a rumor in the neighborhood that he killed his wife.

Beth confronts Noah, who won’t even open the front door for her, only to find her dog later hiding under the porch. She feels bad that she was susceptible to rumor, even though she admits that Noah is creepy.

That creepiness factor increases exponentially when she finds Noah staring into her window one night. When she realizes he’s half dressed and covered in freezing mud, Beth figures something is wrong here. It turns out that Noah sleepwalks, almost going into a fugue state. Beth saves him from his sleepwalking misadventures twice, and they start to form a tentative friendship.

Beth finds out that Noah used to be a criminal profiler before Terrible Things Happened.  Her physical attraction to Noah increases as she gets to know him. He’s a deeply intelligent, observant man who is unable to navigate normal social interactions. But Noah can’t reciprocate Beth’s sexual attraction because of the Terrible Things That Happened.

As the novel progresses, the two enter an unconventional romance while danger lurks outside.

Elyse: This was a strange book and totally not what I expected, but I liked it.

There’s this trope in mysteries and thrillers that a detective who hunts monsters has to be broken and dysfunctional himself. You have Sherlock Holmes and Moriarity; in the books he’s a drug addict. In the BBC show, Sherlock is a sociopath himself. You have Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling/ Will Graham. You have Red John and Patrick Jane from The Mentalist. You have Chelsea Cain’s Gretchen Lowell and Archie Sheridan. I could keep making a list.

Anyway, you almost never see these detectives in a relationship because they’re so emotionally fucked up, and they are usually really dark characters themselves. I think that’s why fanfic for those characters is so popular–as a reader you desperately want to see them in a romantic relationship to see how they navigate it.

So for me Noah Gideon Grant is a callback to all those characters and a “what might have happened” for everyone who wondered. I really enjoyed that.

Sarah: I was on board for 3/4ths of the book, and then the WHAT IS THIS WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE WHERE DID THEY COME FROM WAT happened. I think I said out loud, “Wait, what?”

The first part is psychological thriller/erotica, and it’s fascinating. The hero cannot do bring himself to do certain things for a wordcloud’s worth of complicated reasons, and the heroine is aware of his limits and is willing to help him go around his own rules for his own and her pleasure.

The idea that his sleepwalking brings them together, that she is kind and trusting of him when she has a lot of reasons not to be, lent a danger to their interactions, and an instability and mystery that increased the tension. Why is he sleepwalking? What else does he do when it happens? When does she trust her instincts and when does she not, knowing that in the past those instincts tried to warn her that something wasn’t right and she didn’t listen?

When the external antagonist(s) arrived, it reminded me of the idea that once you’ve had an accident in a vehicle, even if that accident wasn’t your fault, your insurance rates go up because your risk of being in an accident again increases. I used to interpret that as, “If a bad thing happens, then you’re a likely repeat target for bad things happening,” like the strength of your bad thing magnet is increased.

These two are two bad thing magnets powered by every fake Sequoia cell tower in North America. There is no limit to the bad things that happen to these two, and the ease with which the external antagonists reach and affect them both is ludicrous. It came out of nowhere for me, like the villain that smells like maple syrup in the first Scarpetta novel. Surprise! Pancakes will help you solve this case! The antagonists and the switch in tone and almost in genre eroded the strength of the careful psychological thriller/erotic tension of the first 2/3rds of the story.

Elyse: I agree the ending came out of the blue. I was like “Wait…what the who now?” I think that there was a distinct lack of foreshadowing. I thought the psychological conflict was enough, and that an external one was unnecessary. I think Noah’s angst over being able to “get into the head” of a serial killer was more than sufficient. By having his inner-darkness issues resolved by an external factor, I think we missed some serious growth. It felt like once Noah was able to have sex, all his emotional trauma was healed. Instead of a magic penis, it was a magic vagina story.

What did you think of the sexual content in general? I was on board until Noah asked her to choke him. That was a little much for me, honestly.

Sarah: I struggled with that part a LOT – in part because it seemed out of nowhere and unexpected, and also because I didn’t understand why that was an erotic concept for him. There wasn’t enough development of the idea so I would understand why that turned his crank.

I completely agree with you, though, that his inner issues were resolved by having great sex with his neighbor.

The strongest parts for me included the setting – the way in which Noah’s house was described, and the heroine’s backyard when he was sleepwalking, contained a tension that was sustained for pages, something I find very irritating usually but in this case made me more and more curious.

Elyse: One thing that really bothered me is that there were still unanswered questions in the end. Noah’s sleepwalking is never resolved (or if it was it happened so fast I missed it). Is Noah going to stroll onto the interstate one night and get hit by a truck? Obviously the sleepwalking in indicative of a deeper psychological issue, and I didn’t believe those issues were resolved.

Even though the external conflict was resolved, a big part of this book is Noah struggling with his ability to think like a monster and his inner darkness. He never really gets past that, I don’t think, at least not in a way that I found convincing.

I really loved the moody, scary atmosphere of this book, and I loved the exploration of the troubled detective as a hero, but I thought it was a little lacking in execution. I’d give it a B-.

Sarah: I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the psychological thriller/erotica mix of the first 2/3rds, and to be honest, the switch in tone, genre, and antagonist in the ending completely collapsed my enjoyment of this book. I’d give it a hard C-, so let’s average our two grades to a C.