A Couple of Shorts to Start the New Year

I know I usually do these on Saturday but I haven't done much reading over the past few days - due mostly to a re-read of Counterpoint: Song of the Fallen book 1 that I needed to do before I started the sequel, but also because a friend of mine recommended this totally addictive ipad word game app and I've been majorly distracted by that. Bad lady!

 Both the shorts are from the fairly newish Storm Moon Press. I've been very impressed by the quality of the short stories coming out of this publisher and these two are no exception.


 The Saturnalia Effect by Violetta Vane and Heidi Belleau

I read this story before Christmas and was going to review it then but I read a review at Pants Off Reviews (this was quite unusual because I rarely read reviews of books I'm going to review myself) which made me look at the story from an entirely different angle. Since then, I've spent a bit of time pondering the story. It begins as a fairly straightforward prison drama. Troy has been imprisoned when a robbery he was involved in with his twin brother went wrong. His brother killed a cop before going down in a hail of bullets, leaving Troy with the blame and a life sentence. He's struggling to get into the prison routine when former mobster Franchetti gives him a choice: Kill inmate Daniel or be killed himself. Troy sets out to seduce Daniel as a prelude to killing him, only to find himself drawn to Daniel whose presence offers safety and security to the out-of-his-depth Troy.

 Troy was a very interesting character. He's been dominated by his twin all his life and now is adrift without his guiding presence. He's mentally not too stable, on the verge of a breakdown and the pressure of having to kill Daniel, plus the fact that he keeps being attacked by Franchetti's goon, allows us to see a man on the edge. Daniel protects Troy, but a bad experience in the past makes him keep Troy at arms length. So far so good. There's then a point in the book where the story reaches a crisis point, before moving into a slightly paranormal ending involving a statue of the god Saturn. This can either be taken at face value into a HEA, or it can be seen from the deranged point of view of a man who has lost everything and retreated into the security of his own mind. It was all rather clever and engaged my brain as I re-read the story from the alternative side of things, making it a much better and more unusual story than I thought at first.

 The story isn't going to be to everyone's taste because there's a lot of rather graphic violence in the story, plus a hint of dub-con sex, but I thought it a unique twist on the usual romance stories out there.  Grade: Excellent.

 Buy this book HERE.

The Forester by Blaine D Arden

This story is a bit of a mix of fantasy and police procedure. It tells of elf Kelnaht who is a 'truth seeker' which is sort of the elf equivalent of a forensic police officer who uses his special elf-powers to determine the perpetrator of crimes.  The story begins with discovery of a female elf who has been strangled. As part of the investigation Kelnaht is approached by his former lover Ianys, who abandoned their relationship so he could get married and have a child. Kelnaht is still bitter about this, despite Ianys wife having since died.  Ianys confesses to Kelnaht that he is now the lover of The Forester, a shunned tree elf, who Kelnaht is also attracted to.

The fun of this story for me was in the details of the fantasy world created by the author.  We learn so much about elf society through the story, but it's done in such a subtle way that the information is slotted in amongst the story, rather than there being any clumsy info-dumping.  It was the little things - such as how Kelnaht has to fit his wings with his clothes, or the different roles that the elves adopt and their purposes in elf society which delighted me just as much as the larger story arc or the mystery.

The romance also worked well. It's an m/m/m story but the troubled relationship that Ianys and Kelnaht have together isn't glossed over or made instantly better. They still have a long way to go at the end and the HFN way the story ends fits well with the short format and the way the romance progresses.

This is the first story by this author but the richness of the prose and vivid setting in this story makes her one to watch out for in the future. Grade: Excellent.

Buy this book HERE.