Genre: Urban Fantasy, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Ezra Redmayne left behind a life of wealth and luxury for adventure and danger. Refusing to bow to familial expectation, Ezra has been on his own for years, traveling the world, honing his skills as a curse-breaker. A new contract brings him to the Canadian wilderness to tackle a dangerous cursed artifact with a mysterious history, and the potential to destroy entire regions of the countryside.
In pursuit of answers, Ezra meets charismatic history professor Raum Norsson, a man with a lineage even more magical than Ezra’s. Raum is from an ancient bloodline of Elder fae peoples, and he’s spent most of his life feeling like he wasn’t living up to their legacy. When Ezra bursts into his library, exhausted and eager for information, Raum is determined to help the infamous and attractive sorcerer.
Together, both men dig into the history of the cursed artifact and learn more than they ever expected about its history, and themselves. Ezra and Raum are pitted against immortal beings, ancient magics, and a growing connection that neither of them can deny.
GRAVE SIGHT is the first book in the CURSED ARCANA series, and is part of the wider Infinite Arcana Universe. LGBTQ+ Urban Fantasy Romance.
The Review
This contemporary magical world, one that Sheena Jolie cooked up for the Beacon Hill Sorcerer series, is clever and smart. While set in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada, it is a world in which magical beings of all sorts exist and are, to some degree, part of the fabric of everyday life. This book focuses on a young sorcerer—a not-so-secretive necromancer—who has been rejected by his rich California family and has managed to make a living as a curse-breaker. Ezra Redmayne is neuro-atypical (he calls it neurospicy, which I rather like). His professional success has not been matched with personal social success, but that is the essential emotional plot arc of this story.
In a brilliant opening scene worthy of any action movie, Ezra is helicoptered into a magical disaster site, at which several graduate students have died with the unearthing of a magical artifact. Ezra not only figures out what is going on, but makes a discovery that has implications for all of humanity. He is not without fear, but his bravery gives him a kind of power that we know is going to set him apart from everyone else in the book.
In his quest to understand the cursed artifact, he is steered to Raum (pron: Rome) Norsson, a handsome magical history scholar at the University in Edmonton. In a very Sheena Jolie way, there is instant attraction between the two men; but things play out at a carefully calibrated pace that builds on the suspense in the narrative while steering the story to a startling dramatic conclusion. Raum Norsson’s own family history enters into the story significantly, giving Ezra insight into things beyond even his own rather unusual experience.
Redmayne has never thought very highly of himself, but that begins to change as he comes to understand just how explosive the story of this cursed object could become, and how the object of his affection figures into that story.
I really look forward to seeing the next instalment in this series. Jolie has a way with making the most bizarre circumstances feel normal, as befits the sort of magic-filled world they imagine.
Five 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.