Genre: Paranormal, Romance
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
Get It On Amazon
About The Book
He came looking for revenge. Will he walk away from love?
Twenty years after fleeing Madison Gully as a scared sixteen-year-old, after witnessing his sister’s murder, Kirk Gracewell returns as a powerful energy vampire. He wants to find the cougar shifter who killed her and make them pay.
Every ten years, the Madison cougars get together. It’s a time of celebration to meet new partners but also for the seer to announce who’ll get the greatest honor any of them can receive: becoming a familiar to a witch. When the seer gives Sage the task of watching the vampire that’s suddenly arrived, Sage feels slighted; it’s a job for a much younger cougar. But he comes to enjoy the games of cat and mouse he plays with Kirk. Until he learns why the vampire is in Madison Gully.
Now Sage will have to choose: protect his family or help Kirk find the killer. But the killer will stop at nothing to prove to the seer the honor of familiar is his, claim a witch, and bury the past.
For readers who like gay fated mates, shifters, enemies to lovers and small town romance.
The Review
At first I didn’t think this would get all five stars. I rolled my eyes (just a little) at the idea of an “energy vampire,” and of course ALWAYS at the idea of shifter romances (this time cougars, which is unusual). But T.J. Nichols has actually taken these two ideas and (in a world of paranormal beings, which is a huge sub-genre of its own) has created something that is both original and emotionally powerful with them.
Both of the main characters, Kirk Gracewell and Sage Madison are classic romantic types, whom the author makes fully three-dimensional by investing them with emotional complexity and palpable yearning. The very premise of the book is crazy, but the author brings it in and makes you want to wrap your heart around it. These are good guys, each with genuine problems (Kirk’s are heartbreaking, while Sage’s are more pragmatic), who find themselves drawn together by—fate? Chance? Magic?
There’s nothing unusual about the shifter lore with the Madison family, although the internecine friction in the family’s history gives it spice and anxiety. Kirk Gracewood’s family saga has been presented in a startlingly novel way: magical history twisted through misinformation and prejudice into something genuinely horrific. Kirk is a victim without actually understanding it. It is Sage Madison’s instinctual interest in this brooding, dangerous man, that begins to erode the ignorance and bigotry that have made Kirk’s life a misery. Kirk has made a life for himself, without understanding that he could possibly have so much more.
Nichols plays all the cards very carefully and with an eye to internal logic and emotional heft. It’s a great story about family working hard to save itself.
5 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.