The Duke at Hazard (Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune #2)

Title: The Duke at Hazard (Gentlemen of Uncertain Fortune, #2)

Author: KJ Charles

Publisher: Orion

Release Date: July 18, 2024

Genre(s): M/M Historical

Page Count: 336

Rating: 5 stars out of 5 

Read book blurb here

"Vernon Fortescue Cassian George de Vere Crosse, the fourth Duke of Severn, the Earl of Harmsford, Baron Crosse of Wotton, and Baron Vere walked into an inn. They were all the same man." But without his titles, Cassian is nondescript and quiet and all too aware that his own family thinks he has "no more knowledge of the world than a baby, and no more force of character either, and it is no surprise that you cannot manage without a retinue." 

When a one-night stand in an inn results in Severn's ducal signet ring being stolen, Cass has to retrieve it and quickly. Enter Daizell Charnage, Eton's golden boy when Cassian and he attended, a "glowing, laughing young trickster" with charm and charisma to spare. He's been cast out of proper society, due to his parent's actions, "but he'd blackened his own reputation as thoroughly [...] in a slow steady slide out of the Polite World and into disreputability that he couldn't seem to stop." 

When they meet on the road, Cass hires Daizell to find his ring, and due to a scourge of One Bed Only nights at the inns along the way, they have time to explore a relationship that is so incredibly sweet at its core, until Daizell learns exactly who Cass is. But never fear, we get a glorious comeuppance and a well-deserved HEA. 

I must admit I had to adjust my expectations from KJ Charles' often razor sharp characters (see Lucien Vaudrey from the Magpie Lord series) to these two gentle characters but it was such a wonderful read. 5 stars.

I received an ARC from the Publisher, via NetGalley,in exchange for an honest review.

Becoming Ted

Title: Becoming Ted

Author: Matt Cain

Publisher: Storm Publishing

Release Date: June 4, 2024

Genre(s): Contemporary M/M Romance

Page Count: 416

Rating: 4 stars out of 5 

Read book blurb here

43-year-old Ted is devastated when his husband of what Ted thought were 20 wonderful years, Giles, leaves him for a younger, more exciting man. And once Ted begins to realize how Giles has demeaned him and held him back from his dreams, Ted begins working toward his childhood dream of becoming a drag queen. It takes Ted a while, but he gets there in the end, and in between is a big-hearted story that captivated me to the very end. 

There's a lot of characters here but Matt Cain richly develops each one - Ted's parents and their expectation that Ted will continue with the family's ice cream business, his new relationship with Oskar who grew up in homophobic Poland, Ted's best friend and top supporter Denise who values her independence but hopes for "a future that might just involve happiness", 90+ year old Stanley who is not letting life pass him by, even Lily, the very un-cute terrier with "weapons-grade halitosis." 

There's a lot of baggage to get past here, but the book resonates with the idea that "There's no point regretting things we did in the past because if it wasn't for them, we wouldn't be where we are in the present." There are numerous flashbacks to Ted's childhood and his relationship with Giles, but at times it's hard to immediately realize the time period has shifted. And there's a subplot involving mysterious letters that just didn't work for me, but I absolutely loved the conclusion of this book, which admittedly is a total feel-good fest of happiness

although I think Giles should NEVER be seen again and doesn't deserve one bit of forgiveness, but then that's just my bitchy belief

Click here to reveal a spoiler

But I love how Ted becomes liberated from his sense of duty and realizes that he can "put myself first and follow my dream - but I can also take the people I love along with me." 4 stars and many thanks to Storm Publishing for the ARC. 

I received an ARC from Storm Publishing, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

You Should Be So Lucky

Title: You Should Be So Lucky 

Author: Cat Sebastian 

Publisher: Avon 

Release Date: May 7, 2024 

Genre(s): M/M Sports Romance, Historical 

Page Count:  400 

Rating: 5+ stars out of 5 

Read book blurb here

I've read several Cat Sebastian books, and hold a particular fondness for The Queer Principles of Kit Webb, but this book? Sebastian knocks it out of the park (yup, a baseball metaphor). 

I loved this book in a way that makes me ponder the philosophical meaning of baseball (despite not being a huge fan of baseball).

It's slow and often seems pointless. It's beautiful, when it isn't a mess. There's a vast ocean of mercy for mistakes: getting hits half the time is nothing short of a miracle, and even the best fielders are expected to have errors. The inevitability of failure is built into the game.

It's 1960, and Eddie O'Leary, a sunny shortstop with one of the most beautiful swings anyone's ever seen, sure hands and excellent fielding, has been traded by the Kansas City A's to the New York Robins, a new expansion team scrapping the bottom of the league. He's experiencing a slump, the likes of which is hard to even watch, and the Robins aren't speaking to him because he insulted everyone on the team when he learned he was traded. 

Mark Bailey is in the midst of a slump as well, a gray miserable half-life of merely surviving a tragedy that is slowly revealed over the course of the book. He's a writer at the Chronicle assigned to write a weekly diary of Eddie O'Leary over the course of the season. 

The stage is set, and what unfolds is gloriously elegiac as the two men move from reluctant collaborators to a sort of friendship and then into a relationship. The book is short on explicit sex scenes, and long on matters of the heart. Here are two men who form a relationship that works in the midst of a time where being gay is something to hide, something to deny. 

Eddie and Mark are beautifully articulated, and even the secondary and tertiary characters are fully fleshed out. You end the book caring these people. At 400 pages, I could have easily read another 100 pages and still want more. 

And I love the way Sebastian give us deeper things to ponder than merely a meet/cute, fall-in-love relationship. There's the nature of fate, the idea that statistically statistics don't really matter at all, and sometimes ....

Rooting for a team doesn't always mean that you need them to win; sometimes you just want to see them fight, do their best, or even just showing up. Sometimes you want to look at a guy and say: Well, he's fucked, but he's trying.

5+ stars for this book. You should be so lucky to pick up this book! 

And a final wonderful thought from Eddie: "I'm not saying things happen for a reason - I hate that. I'm saying that things happen. And it doesn't have to mean anything except what it means to you. Nobody else gets to decide. "

I received an ARC from the publisher, via NetGalley, in exchange for an honest review.

A Death at His Majesty's (The Simon Simpson Mysteries, #3)

Title: A Death at His Majesty's (The Simon Simpson Mysteries, #3)

Author: David Dawson

Publisher: Park Creek Publishing

Release Date: April 18, 2024

Genre(s): Historical Murder Mystery

Page Count: 280

Rating: 4 stars out of 5 

Read book blurb here

The first two book in the Simon Sampson Mysteries series are set in late 1932 and 1933 in London and Berlin, respectively, featuring political conspiracies and high intrigue. The main character, Simon Sampson works for BBC news and his close friend Bill (Florence Mills) manages the BBC library, although they are each equally comfortable in the arena of spies and espionage. 

A Death at His Majesty's serves as a prequel to the series, set in 1929 London when Bill was Noel Coward's beleaguered assistant and Simon worked as a journalist for the Chronicle. They meet when the prop girl, Maureen Lyon, Bill's former lover, is founded murdered by the stage door of the Majesty, when Noel Coward's operetta Bitter Sweet is set to open. A second death leaves Bill and Simon searching for a common thread to the death and uncovering a killer that may have connections to those in powerful places. 

As always, Dawson does an exception job of setting the scene with historic details about the era, and the gay men and women who lived in an other version of London. Ironically, "it's not even illegal in this country for women to be ... Sapphic ... as far as I know. The law's just obsessed with buggery, you know. Between chaps. The ladies are left alone." Yet this did not prevent women who frequented bars such as Paradise Regained, the Cherry Tree or the Honey Pot from pressure from the police. 

We also get Bill's POV throughout the book and get more of a glimpse into her background, and her acerbic personality. But we also see all the societal pressures that Bill fought against; Simon's Aunt Cynny, who has an important job in the Home Office, serves as an example of the few women who managed to overcome these assumptions and pressures. 

Personally, I didn't think the mystery and conclusion as gripping as the end of A Death in Berlin (but then, it is hard to top that ending!) and some characters like Darling were sort of shoe-horned in without a lot of depth, However, learning how Bill and Simon became friends and getting more pieces of the history of pre-WWII, I did like this installment in the series. I think the author has definitely found his niche, and as always, I'm looking forward to the next book! 4 stars. 

I received an ARC from the author in exchange for an honest review.

Death in the Spires

Title: Death in the Spires

Author: KJ Charles

Publisher: Storm Publishing

Release Date: April 11, 2024

Genre(s): M/M Murder Mystery, Historical

Page Count: 273

Rating: 5 stars out of 5 

Read book blurb here

Jem, Nicky, Aaron, Hugh, Toby, Ella and Prue - The Seven Wonders, or at the start "Feynsham's set" - Toby's curated collection of fellow students who met their first year in Oxford, becoming fast friends, until Toby's murder in the spring of their third year, 1895. Ten years after, Jem loses his lowly clerk job because of a note sent to his employer: 

Jeremy Kite is a murderer. 

He killed Toby Feynsham. 

Ask him why. 

Following Toby's death, they never told the police what really happened earlier that horrid evening and they went on with their lives, with varying degrees of success. Jem, who fell perhaps the lowest in the aftermath, decides once and for all to uncover who murdered Toby ... and why. 

 KJ Charles gives us the world of Oxford seen in a hundred movies (The world was before them, a great sunlit path through pleasant meadows with a glittering city at its end ready for them to conquer.) - Hugh Grantesque boys in long robes on the quad, friends arm in arm walking down the hallowed paths, student theatricals, etc.: 

"They were facing south, looking over Front Quad and Broad Street and toward the main spread of Oxford, and the setting sun turned everything before him to glowing rose gold. The domes and spires rose like masts from the sea, like prayers to heaven, a glory of human brilliance in stone ..." 

But it's also a world where while there is love and friendship, there is more. "Ah, British friendship ... Tolerance as long as everyone knows his place, but God forbid your subjects should declare themselves your equals." As Nicky says "So: all of us could have, none of us would have, one of us did." And while we ponder Toby's murder, we are lead to ask if murder can ever be justified and if worse crimes have gone unpunished. 

It's all deep, heady stuff and KJ Charles shepherds us through the discoveries, the abject sadness, the philosophical and the practical, all the while giving us a small M/M romance (with absolutely no hint of a HFN or HEA). I found this book deeply moving, completely engrossing and 5+ stars and a Recommended Read if you have the heart for it. 

I received an ARC from the publisher, Storm Publishing, in exchange for an honest review.