Review: Pining for the Prince – Rebecca Cohen

Genre: Fantasy, Romance

LGBTQ+ Category: Gay

Reviewer: Ulysses, Paranormal Romance Guild

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About The Book

Amazon Link: Amazon

Sometimes being a vampire sucks, and not in a good way. Gwil might have accepted his vampire afterlife didn’t come with rubbing shoulders with the elite and endless wealth, despite what his sire might alluded to, but working as a private detective isn’t all bad. Being dragged into Vampire Council business is annoying at times but there are worst things—the worst being years of pining after his best friend, business partner, and fae prince, Hyax.

Spending so much time with Hyax is getting harder, and now Hyax has told his parents that Gwil is his betrothed to stop them from trying to marry him off, everything gets even more difficult. Add in meddling family members on both sides to fake dating a prince, a missing crown jewel, and rogue flower fairies, Gwil thinks things can’t get any more complicated until they do…

Pining for the Prince is the first of Fang & Fae, a MM Paranormal Romance series, where a vampire and a fae prince go from best friends to lovers while solving mysteries along the way.

The Review

The first of what promises to be an entertaining series, we are welcomed to a modern London mostly familiar, but for the fact that magical creatures not only exist, but are to some degree integrated into the human world.

The human world, however, is not of much concern, because the protagonists in this comic drama/mystery are Gwillam Hilt, a 200-year old vampire, and his business partner Hyax, who is a Fae prince and even older than Gwil.

The opening salvo in the plot is Gwil being asked by a rich and powerful vampire—Mr. Flume—to retrieve a long-lost family heirloom from the British Museum. By stealing it. This introduces the reader to the irritations and complexities of dealing with the vampire social hierarchy in Gwil’s world, where his only status comes from a fairly important sire, and the fact that his sister, also a vampire, married up into the vampire aristocracy.

The next major complication appears when Gwil has to break the news to Hyax, his Fae partner. The obvious problem is that the Fae have a keen dislike of vampires in general. The less obvious problem is that Gwil has a profound crush on Hyax, who has been his best friend for years. The fact that Hyax has a similar crush on Gwil, but fears acting on it for more or less the same reasons as Gwill, adds another frisson of romantic nonsense that should be catnip to people like me who love books like this.

I won’t spoil the fun by telling you anything more about the various little plot twists that ratchet up both the fun and the anxiety in the action. We get to see the skill of Gwil and Hyax as a detective team, but also their vulnerability when dealing with the prejudices and byzantine politics of the world of magical creatures. We see a world that can’t help but evoke that of Hogwarts and Muggles, but one which is entirely fresh and different. For all the humor generously salted through the plot, there’s more than enough emotional insecurity and danger to keep things on edge without making it too stressful.

Hyax and Gwil are great characters, and I expect some of the secondary roles will make welcome reappearances in future books in this series. Fingers crossed.

The Reviewer

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