Beat by Stephen Jay Schwartz

Released: September 28, 2010

Beat is the second thriller by Stephen Jay Schwartz following Boulevard and once again featuring sex addict and LAPD detective Hayden Glass. The novel is due to release at the end of September 2010.

After Hayden Glass' sex addiction gets him into trouble, Glass has moved from seeking women on the street to watching internet porn from the safety of his home. When Glass becomes obsessed with a woman he meets through a web-cam sex site named Cora who soon goes missing, he finds himself pulled into an investigation with the FBI and smack-dab in the middle of a nasty sex slave trade operation.


Beat is surly, grimy, dark, grainy, morbid and erotic; all perfect adjectives to describe the novel. You'll definitely cringe from both the explicit violence and sex scenes -- or, if you're twisted like me, you might relish it instead. Although the actions and events in Beat are described quite vividly, I still feel as if the novel lacks character depth because we're not exposed to many internal thoughts or inner-monologue (especially from Glass), which I feel makes for a very detached experience. The sex is on a whole new level being that it's violent and qualifies as borderline erotica, which is one of the benefits to reading Beat.

The premise of Beat is highly intriguing, yet the novel tends to drags on just a bit.

Actually, to be brutally honest, if it hadn't been for all the explicit and (wonderfully) dirty erotica, I would not have finished Beat! I do give kudos to Stephen Jay Schwartz for providing down-and-dirty, perverse and sleazy material -- what a unique reading experience!

Stephen Jay Schwartz's first novel is Boulevard (2009).