Tag: harper fox

#RAtR: Favourite M|M books clothed in autumnal covers

Read Around the Rainbow

As you’re probably aware, #RAtR is a blogging project I am doing with a few friends who also write LGBTQIA romance. You can find everyone by clicking here or on the image to the right.

This month, to celebrate the start of autumn, we’re talking about our favourite books with red, yellow and orange covers! Mine are The Salisbury Key by Harper Fox, Slippery Creatures by K. J. Charles and The Lawrence Brown Affair by Cat Sebastian.

The Salisbury Key by Harper Fox

The Salisbury Key is one of my favourite Harper Fox books–and there are so many to choose from. Most recently I’ve listened to this in audio and it’s a perfect rendition.

There’s a lot of pain in this story. Warnings for suicide, grief and the trauma that falls out from them. It’s a long time since I read it and because the audio is much slower than I read myself, I think the grief had much more impact on me.

Dan is devastated when his older partner kills himself, and sets himself to find out why through the haze of emotion and guilt he’s surrounded by. He meets a young soldier, Rain, who he has an instant connection with and together they open a can of worms containing biological weapons and evil. It’s a bit of an odd mixture with the archaeology thread, but it works really well and it’s a favourite of mine. The narration is perfect. I loved Rain’s voice in particular and I love this version of the cover.

Slippery Creatures by K. J. Charles

This is the first of the Will Darling Adventures and I cannot tell you how much I love all of them. Not quite as much as The Green Men…but the cover colour was wrong, so here we are :).

1920s stories are very much my bag both to read and write and this one hits all my beats. Sparky flappers, wounded heroes, people utterly messed up from four years of war finding their feet again and a long, involved mystery arc that threads all three books together.

Highly recommend.

The Lawrence Browne Affair by Cat Sebastian

I love this series of Cat Sebastian’s. They are early eighteenth century historicals with an excellent portrayal of late Georgian England.

In this episode, we meet Lawrence, the definitive Mad Scientist archetype. He’s shut up in his ruinous castle in the middle of the countryside. Is he mad, though? Or is he just neurodivergent? YOU DECIDE! I love him.

I also love Georgie, who’s a proper con-artist, but goes straight for love and has to get himself out of the pickle he’s got himself and Lawrence involved with.

There is also a very large dog, which is another reason to highly recommend it.

Find everyone else’s favourite’s here!

Nell Iris : Ofelia Grand : Amy Spector : Ellie Thomas : Holly Day : K. L. Noone : Addison Albright

#AmReading

This week, two gay romances, one fantasy, one contemporary, and a contemporary fantasy story with roots set deep in English myth.

Seducing the Sorcerer by Lee Welch

Cover, Seducing the Sorcerer, Lee Welch.

There’s a magic horse that eats eiderdowns. That’s all you should need to know in order to one-click  this book. Go and get it now. Immediately.

Other than that…it’s just as beautifully written as Lee Welch’s previous books. The characters are complex and well drawn–Fenn, who’s POV we follow–is an older character in his mid-forties and has fallen on hard times. He’s at the end of his rope when he gets swindled by a farmer he does some work for and is paid with a sackcloth horse. After that his life gets extremely weird.

I loved this whole premise. Fenn is just such a good character. He’s likeable, he’s realistic in that he tries to do the right thing and doesn’t always quite manage it. He makes assumptions and he acts on the spur of the moment and he is tired of fighting for things. He’s also seriously freaked out by magic. The world-building is wonderful–the magic system is there in the background and we pick it up as we go along rather than it being spoon-fed to us. This is my bag, as you are probably aware. The slow-burn romance between Fenn and Morgrim the sorcerer is very well paced and there are political machinations going on behind the scenes that gradually become clear to both the reader and Fenn. I loved their relationship dynamic. Hard recommend!

The Salisbury Key by Harper Fox (audio)

Cover, audiobook, Harper Fox, The Salisbury Key

There’s a lot of pain in this story. Warnings for suicide, grief and the trauma that falls out from them. It’s a long time since I read it and because the audio is much slower than I read myself, I think the grief had much more impact on me. Dan is devastated when his older partner kills himself, and sets himself to find out why through the haze of emotion and guilt he’s surrounded by. He meets a young soldier, Rain, who he has an instant connection with and together they open a can of worms containing biological weapons and evil. It’s a bit of an odd mixture with the archaeology thread, but it works really well and it’s a favourite of mine. The narration is perfect. I loved Rain’s voice in particular. Recommend.

The Green Man’s Heir by Juliet E. McKenna

Cover The Green Man's Heir by Juliet E. McKenna

I came across this via a twitter rec and it’s glorious. The MC is the son of a dryad and a human. He can see supernatural creatures but is not one himself…dryad’s sons are long lived and heal easily, but only their daughters are actual dryads.  Our hero, Dan, is an itinerant carpenter, vaguely searching for other men like him–he wants to learn how they cope with living in a modern age of computer ID and registration when they don’t age as swiftly as humans. He has dreams that he interprets as messages from the Green Man, guiding him here and there across the country. In Derbyshire, he stumbles onto a murder that turns out to have a supernatural element and becomes involved with a local estate that has a dragon problem. This is a first in series and I’m about to begin the second. It’s lovely writing…rooted in the countryside and in English myth with likeable, rich characters that kept me turning the pages. Highly recommend.

That’s it for this week!

#AmReading

#AmReading, Ally is reading.

This week we have two old favourite gay romances I’ve rediscovered in audio by Harper Fox and Z. A. Maxfield and a brilliant dystopian sci-fi with a tentative background sapphic love interest by Micaiah Johnson.

Seven Summer Nights by Harper Fox (audio)

Seven Summer Nights by Harper Fox

Another comfort-read for me that I have discovered included with my renewed Audible subscription. Beautifully narrated by Chris Clog, it’s a two-part novel set just after World War 2. Archie is a car-mad vicar without vocation. Rufus is a disgraced, shell-shocked archaeologist sent to investigate his church. It’s a story evocative of the shattered period after the war ended, bombed out houses still standing stark in London streets, men and women bent out of shape by years of fighting trying to fit back in to a more ‘normal’ life. Rufus and Archie are both damaged and hurt in different ways and Harper Fox’s delicate, precise writing paints them as perfect creatures with depth of character and emotion. The rural idyll of Archie’s village is laid over the top of past horrors in the same way the veneer of normality is starting to be laid over the horrors and displacement of the war. It’s one of my favourite books and I really recommend it, both in written form and narration.

The Long Way Home by Z. A. Maxfield (audio)

The Long Way Home by Z. A. Maxfield

I really love these ‘cops and psychics’ stories and am digging into as many as I can find at the moment. This one has a big hurt-comfort plot as Kevin, an ex cop who has become psychic because of an accident, tries to help cop Connor track down a child murder. Things are complicated because Connor’s childhood boyfriend was also taken and murdered by the same person. (I don’t think this is a spoiler, it’s pretty obvious right from the start where it’s going). Both men are vulnerable and hurting and the audio just hit the spot for me when I picked it up on Audible Whispersync. Recommended.

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

The Space Between Worlds by Micaiah Johnson

Wonderful far-future multiple worlds story. A brilliant scientist on Earth Zero (Our world? Who knows?) has discovered how to slip people between universes that have a similar vibration to ours…ie, that aren’t too different. But people can only traverse to another universe if their counterpart there is dead. Climate deterioration has split the world–all the worlds accessible to our characters–into haves and have-nots. And because the have-nots are less likely to survive in each world–poor food, no protection against the heat of the sun, poisoned water–they tend to be the traversers. There’s a fantastic plot, a tentative background sapphic love story and brilliant worldbuilding, all wrapped up in truly lyrical prose.

That’s all for this week!