Genre: Paranormal, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
As if having a powerful druid and a goddess for parents doesn’t suck enough, throwing a vengeful god into the fray certainly doesn’t do Aiden any favors.
Aiden Mercer’s summer has been interesting—if by interesting you mean life-threatening and heartbreaking that is. With fall fast approaching, he’s looking for a quiet time in the arms of his boyfriend, Naël, the handsome merman.
Alas, life never quite goes the way you plan it, does it? Unless Aiden finds a way to stop the wicked god Baburaj and his mother, Jhanvi from achieving their devilish goals, pain and destruction will hover over him like a starving vulture.
In the third and final book in the Of Magic & Scales series, the familiar cast of zany but lovable characters is back, and they are bringing reinforcements for what promises to be an epic and sexy ending. Join Aiden, Naël, and their circle of magical friends in their final adventure.
No magical creatures were harmed in the writing of this book.
The Review
Since I was dropped into the third book of this series, I got to experience how well Natalina Reis brings her readers along into the ongoing narrative. The central figures are Aiden Mercer and his boyfriend, Naël Fouchard. Fouchard must have been a major player in the earlier books, for not only is he a merman, but he has coaxed the thirty-seven-year-old Aiden out of what was apparently a slutty life and into blissful monogamy.
The crux of the three-part story is Aiden’s parentage, about which we learn a good deal, as Aiden grieves over his lousy childhood and absentee mother and father. But he has bigger fish to fry in part 3, since a longtime nemesis, a minor but violent Indian god named Baburaja, is back on the scene with ill intent.
This matters because Aiden has achieved something like a normal life, living in the Portuguese seaside resort town of Cascais, and managing his own local coffee shop. All he wants is to be left alone to love Naël and his adolescent sister Vee, as well as his motley crew of friends, witch and “regular.” Having a murderous Hindu deity after you (did we ever find out why?) tends to disrupt daily life, and it is keeping those he holds dear safe that finally forces Aiden to confront his anger and self-pity.
All in all, a fun fantasy, even if I felt like I didn’t know everybody quite well enough—not the author’s fault! I did find Aiden more of a jerk than I’d have liked, but since he admits to being a jerk, I had to kind of forgive him.
Reis and her readers are, like many in the m/m world, enamored of descriptive scenes of sexual intimacy, and as always I have to confess that I rarely care much about that. I love that Aiden has found happiness with a big muscular merman, but I’m more inclined to leave their love-life behind closed doors.
I guess I ought to pick up the first two books in the series, because I suspect I missed a lot of fun.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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