Genre: Urban Fantasy, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild
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About The Book
Cole Ryan is bored. He’s lived in the same small town his whole life and has the same job. Nothing changes there and every morning when he goes for a run, those thoughts echo on repeat through his mind. Until today, on this day, something big happens and if he survives it, his life won’t be the same. Maybe boring old Hickory Crossing wasn’t so bad after all.
Driving in the rain, on his way to a delivery, Bobby Sanders is focused on the road, when a flash of blue light in the distance catches his eye. He witnesses a bolt of lightning strike a man running on the road ahead of him. He never suspected that bolt of lightning could change both their lives, not just the poor guy who was blown out of his shoes right in front of him.
When the persistent sound of whispering won’t go away, Cole questions his sanity. But maybe he’s not the only one experiencing strange things.
The Review
A young man, bored with his life and wondering about what might have been, is struck by lightning on a country road. Another young man is witness to the eerie blue lightning and comes to the rescue.
The rest of the story is an epic small-town romance in which the protagonists spend most of their time expressing confusion—and yet somehow ineluctably drawn to each other.
Is it fate? Is it magic? Or is it just dumb luck?
Cole Ryan has spent all his thirty years in Hickory Crossing, California. He’s not unhappy, but he can’t help regretting his decision to never leave the place where he grew up. Bobby Sanders is the twenty-something son of Irish transplants who run a successful small printing business—while their daughter manages the parent operation in Dublin. His calm little world is turned upside down when he accompanies the lightning-struck young man to the hospital, and witnesses something beyond belief.
The essence of the story is Bobby and Cole figuring things out in fits and starts. Part of that narrative is visiting the Carnival of Mysteries—flyers for which just happen to be one of Bobby’s father’s printing jobs. You know right away that the Carnival is part of this mystery, but the fun is in being along for the ride as these two young men sort out the truth behind the unbelievable phenomena they experience, as well as their sudden attachment to each other. The Carnival always knows what it’s doing. But it doesn’t tell.
Families play a big part in this, and also secrets kept that are eventually revealed. It’s not a high-anxiety narrative, and at the end I found myself hoping that there’s a sequel, because I definitely did not learn enough about Bobby and Cole. Let’s hope that BL Maxwell is thinking along the same lines.
4 stars.
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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