Genre: Paranormal, Mystery, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
This case is really going to the dogs…
After I try a little off-the-books interrogation to locate my selkie almost-boyfriend’s nearly-ex-husband (don’t ask, it’s complicated), I’m in the doghouse again with my bosses, who bust me back to surveillance. Ugh. So when another human inexplicably storms into Quest Investigations—something our security spells ought to prevent since I’m supposed to be the only human admitted to our offices—I’m reduced to staking out local fast food restaurants to check out the guy’s alleged sighting of a giant, glowing-eyed, dumpster-diving spectral hound.
Ridiculous, right? Humiliating, too, not to mention boring. But at least they didn’t fire me.
Imagine my surprise when there actually is a giant, glowing-eyed, dumpster-diving spectral hound—one of the Cwn Annwn, Herne the Hunter’s traitor-tracking dog pack, to be exact. Jeez, who let this dog out? It’s my case, though, so it’s up to me—Matt Steinitz, aka Hugh Mann—to return him to Faerie. But while Herne’s normally hopping kennels are inexplicably unpopulated by pups, they’re playing host to one extremely dead body.
Uh oh. Looks like someone’s bite was a lot worse than their bark.
Guess my love life will have to take a back seat again while we nose out the truth.
Dammit.
The Hound of the Burgervilles is the second in the Quest Investigations M/M mystery series, a spinoff of E.J. Russell’s Mythmatched paranormal rom-com story world. It contains no on-page sex or violence, and although there is a romantic subplot, it is not a romance. The series is best read in order.
The Review
I’m always a little skittish about reading a book from the middle of a series, but I readily engaged in this tale, the second of a series of four, set in a fantasy world where everything magical and mythical exists alongside (but guarded from) the rest of us humans. This is a kind of fiction I enjoy, and E.J. Russell is particularly adept at it. Her ability to render character, and her sense of humor that stops short of silliness, made this an enormously enjoyable read.
Matt Steinitz, thirty-seven and on the plump side, is the only human member of the Quest Investigations staff (hence his wry “nom de guerre,” Hugh Mann). I guess the pseudonym helps him keep his work on the down low, because the human world must be kept in strict ignorance of the supernatural world that exists within and around it.
Rising from the previous book in this series, Matt has a rebellious young dryad as a best friend—Eleri; and a painful crush on Lachlan Brodie, his client from the first book. Matt’s crush is not unrequited, but it is, for the time being, on hold because Lachlan (a selkie prince) is still married. This sets up the romantic-but-not-romance aspect of the story, which was absolutely fine by me. In fact, I loved that Matt and Lachlan manage to move their relationship along without so much as a kiss. Yearning is fine for me. Potential is a promise. Maybe I’m just old. LOL.
The setup of this fantasy world is sly and often funny: the whole heaven/hell/mortal/fae pantheon has been modernized and rearranged to fit better with a post-Age of Reason modern world (where you and I live). Thus things have been liberalized and bureaucratized in a way that is both more geared towards justice, and also inclined to be absurdly familiar. Russell has imagined this world in great detail, and it’s a lot of fun to see it unfold.
The goofy title is a nod to Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes tale, but also represents the humor of the situation: Burgerville is a chain of fast-food joints in Portland, Oregon, while the hound is a spectral dog with glowing eyes whose origins lead Matt and his friends on an adventure that becomes surprisingly sinister, without ever becoming terrifying or unduly gruesome. Of particular appeal to me is a young werewolf named Jordan—an intern at Quest Investigations, a pup in fact. His attachment to the underworld dog becomes a central motif in the plot, allowing his character to grow even as Matt’s own relationship with his supernatural colleagues—and potential love interest—matures. It’s great to see characters evolve, and E.J. Russell gives her fictional actors plenty of emotional space.
I’ve already bought the third and fourth books in the series.
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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