Saving Hannah

Barnaby (the Little Boy Lost series) mixes soap opera clichés, gay romance, and even the Mafia into this ludicrously written and overplotted novel that has exactly one clever idea. Thomas Aberthol is fresh out of prison for hacking. His daughter, Hannah, has leukemia and needs an expensive bone marrow transplant Thomas can’t afford. Out of the blue, Thomas’s college roommate, Aleksander Sanna, now a billionaire, asks Thomas to investigate his father’s murder. But by using his hacking skills to do so, Thomas risks being sent back to prison. To mitigate this, Aleksander proposes the men get married so Hannah can get the health insurance she needs and the two men can’t be forced to testify against each other. Besides, Aleksander is in love with Thomas, who kissed him and fled 10 years before. There are perfunctory shopping sprees and sticky sex scenes, which clash with the thriller elements involving the discovery of a money laundering scheme. With its wildly uneven tone and one-dimensional characters, this romantic thriller fails to generate excitement on any level. (Dec.)