HEXSLAYER
JORDAN L. HAWK (Hexworld #3)
Widdershins Press LLC (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 3.8* of five
The Publisher Says: Horse shifter Nick has one rule: never trust a witch.
Nick has devoted his life to making his saloon a safe haven for the feral familiars of New York. So when a brutal killer slaughters a feral under his protection, Nick has no choice but to try and catch the murderer. Even if that means bonding with a handsome Irish witch.
Officer Jamie MacDougal came back from the war in Cuba missing part of a leg and most of his heart. After his former lover becomes one of the killer’s victims, Jamie will do anything to solve the case.
Nick comes to Jamie with a proposal: after making a temporary bond, they will work together to stop the murders. Once the killer is caught, they walk away and never see one another again.
It sounds simple enough. But the passion that flares between the two men won’t be so easily extinguished. And if Nick can’t learn to trust his witch, he stands to lose everything—including his life.
My Review: An entertaining read, befouled by six (6) w-bombs, one extra heinous because it occurs midway through a sexual encounter. I mean! How the hell is one supposed to maintain an erection while some goofball w-verbs? Mr. Softee pretty much guaranteed.
Anyway, the story itself builds out Hexworld more completely. We learn that there are seven popes; we learn the ancience of familiars' existence with a reference to Altamira's cave paintings...an explanation of their odd actions that's just flat genius! We're "treated" to an expanded take on the plight of the familiars. We're shown why so many familiars are same-sex couples. And, in trul Author Hawk fashion, we're also given little cameos from earlier stories:
Detective Tom Halloran crouched beside the hex. His familiar, Cicero, observed closely as Tom laid his hand carefully on the bloody marks.
–and–
“I know better than to disturb a crime scene.” She lowered her voice. “I read the Howl and Roger dime novels, you see.”
And the story itself? Well...I wasn't thrilled. Nick, the angry stallion, got old fast. His witch, Jamie, puts up with being lied to, manipulated, abused physically and emotionally, and absorbs with stunning rapidity the fact that "he didn't mean it."
He started for the door. “Wait,” Nick called.
“You ain’t given me a reason to,” Jamie said, and slammed the door behind him.
Um. Yeah...no. The man's a classic narcissistic abuser. The last-minute conversion/forgiveness isn't thrilling to me. But Nick's conversion to decency at least an admission that he wasn't a great guy to begin with. Rook, his brother, doesn't seem to be anywhere near critical enough of Nick's rage's effects of those around him.
I felt parts of the tale were rushed, eg the smuggled ferals, the quasi-redemption of a duplicitous relative; I suppose this is inevitable when publishing a book in this category where 100,000 words is way past the norm of 70,000. I'm also pleased that so many of the previous couples in the series get the screen time that they do. It's not a lot but it's used to reinforce the interconnectedness of problem-solving activities in this world. No one, nor any couple-unit, is required to rely solely on their own resources...IF they can get their issues out of the way of asking for help. Nick, angry stallion that he is, learns that lesson very late but very effectively.
God. Jamie’s cheeks burned, but he wasn’t going to let Nick walk out like nothing at all had happened. “It was good. You know.”
Nick swallowed, the brown skin of his throat working. “It won’t happen again.” He spoke the words with such finality that Jamie couldn’t think how to answer. Nick ducked his dark head, hunched his shoulders, and vanished back out into the overcast fall day.
It always feels good to me when the abuser gets abused...though in fact that's a terrible way to resolve the actual underlying lack-of-respect issue.
I have nothing but happy feelings about the nature, identity, and fate of the baddies.
“Ingram is crazy if he thinks people are going to stop using magic. Especially the rich. No society lady is going to give up the witch in the laundry, using hexes to make her whites brighter, let alone the rest of it.”
–and–
Pick a group, demonize them, and use the resulting fear to pass whatever laws you like.
It's an evergreen for a reason. So there it is...more to like than to frown at, more to applaud than to censure. Hexworld is a terrific creation. Not every hero is blemish-free, not every villain is a wicked mustachio-twirling caricature. And in the middle of it all are men trying their damnedest to grab and hold some happiness, spread some kindness, and sit in the sunshine with their loved ones, absorbing the world's sweetness.
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JORDAN L. HAWK (Hexworld #3.5)
Widdershins Press LLC (non-affiliate Amazon link)
99¢ Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 4.25* of five
The Publisher Says: Can a lawman witch find love with an outlaw familiar?
After weeks spent tracking down the gentleman bandit Rafael, Hexas Ranger Enoch Bright finally has the outlaw in his sights. He doesn’t expect to find out Rafael is his familiar.
When Enoch runs afoul of the murderous Bone Gang, he and Rafael strike a deal to take down the gang together. As lawman and outlaw work together, Enoch soon realizes the next thing the gentleman bandit steals will be his heart.
My Review: Charming short extending Hexworld out to the Wild, Wild West. Rafael the Hawk, Enoch the Black Ranger...how will Author Hawk weave y'all into the main Hexworld story? And, more to the point, WHEN?!
Also: 3 (three) w-bombs, not one of 'em necessary. Three-quarters of a star off.
A lawman's worst nightmare is a miscreant whose nature makes them untrappable.
Banks, debt collectors, and taxmen hated the Gentleman Bandit with a passion, and would be happy to see him hang. Ordinary folks…less so.
Ordinary folks, whether they're bystanders with no dog in the fight or beneficiaries of the Bandit's largesse, more often than not celebrate the deeds of the underdog. And the underdog's almost never the lawman. Not even one of the US Marshals, Magical Law Enforcement Division, usually called the Hexas Rangers.
Rafael, who is a sort-of Robin del Hood the Gentleman Bandit, shifts into a Harris's hawk, the only raptor I know of that hunts in co-operative groups! It's just perfect for this series: A predator, but like a wolf one that is predisposed to co-operation instead of the solitary territoriality of most raptorial birds. It explains why he's got these urges to help the prey of banksters and railroad land-grabbers...he's sociable even in his shifted form, and inclined to help not hurt by his human (murky) past. He and Enoch have each run afoul of the Bone Gang in the past, so what could make more sense than co-operating until they take the bastards down? We know where these "this far and no farther" things lead....
The sex between the men was smokin'; the setting was a lovely surprise; the way that the bonding between witch and familiar functions as a form of love-at-first-sight is played for laughs here, and that worked.
I hope that we'll see more of these men and this setting. There was nowhere near enough time to get into their inner connection. I would adore that to happen in the very near future. Hint, hint.
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HEXHUNTER
JORDAN L. HAWK (Hexworld #4)
Widdershins Press LLC (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$4.99 Kindle edition, available now
Rating: 4.75* of five
The Publisher Says: Detective Bill Quigley fell in love with the familiar Isaac the night they met. But after more than two years, it’s time to admit to himself that Isaac doesn’t return his feelings.
Isaac knows he’s too broken by his experiences for anyone to fall in love with. Especially someone like Bill, who deserves a partner unplagued by Isaac’s nightmares and doubts.
When children go missing from an orphanage, Bill and Isaac must work together to find them. And as years of yearning threaten to ignite into passion, they must decide once and for all whether to take a chance on love.
I RECEIVED THIS BOOK FROM MY SECRET SANTA! *SMOOCH*
My Review: First, read this:
Nothing seemed odd about the figure itself, other than depicting the Holy Familiar. Which, yes, this was a Belfastian institution, but he still would’ve expected Saint Jerome, patron of orphans.
–and–
“Denying a part of yourself is never a good thing. Familiars who stay too long in animal shape start to forget they were ever human, and those who stay human forget they were ever an animal. They lose half of themselves either way.”
–and–
"It’s significant because it revealed details of a civilization known to us only through the tales of the Greeks, tales recorded long after the Minoans—the ancient inhabitants of Crete, that is—vanished. There are many interesting points irrelevant to tonight’s discussion, but one of the things claimed by the legends—and supported by the excavations—is that the royal family were all familiars.”
If you've followed me long enough, you know that I'm an old fan of Author Hawk's Whyborne & Griffin Lovecraftian-horror series. I'm a sucker for expanding the Cthulhu Mythos in ways that would appall and repulse Lovecraft! And I'm always down for some good, old-fashioned men-shaggin'-men action.
On screen or off. *leer*
So here we are in a different late-Victorian/early-Edwardian/Gilded-Age New York City, another of my personal favorite settings for fiction or non-fiction. In this Manhattan, the world has SEVEN Catholic Churches, an underclass made up of magical familiars who can assume animal shapes, and an overclass of witches whose control of the magic inherent in the familiars renders their powers usable and useful to Humanity at large. Which does not, of course, translate into being valued at their correct level.
What this series does, in its set-up, is interrogate 1) crony-capitalist dystopian society; 2) the role of hatred and prejudice towards all those who make up the QUILTBAG community; and 3) the intense miseries of being trapped in an identity that simply is not yours, bears no resemblance to your true nature, and being reviled for daring to claim your proper place in the world.
“Denying a part of yourself is never a good thing. Familiars who stay too long in animal shape start to forget they were ever human, and those who stay human forget they were ever an animal. They lose half of themselves either way.”
–and–
"Rook said this case has something to do with missing familiar children?”
“Potential familiars, yes.”
Bill felt suddenly sick. “Saint Mary, Holy Familiar of Christ. You don’t think whoever has them is doing this, whatever this is, to them too?”
–and–
“Assumed to be the wrong gender at birth?”
“Exactly. Yet, {the Minoan royal familiars} took the familiar form associated with their proper gender. Nathan, you would have been a bull, not a snake. Which to me suggests human intervention.”
This is some heady, high-level worldbuilding. Think about the mental pathways that this creative leap took: Minoan civilization vanished; we know now it existed but for millennia it was a bad legend of a woman who transgressed her marriage vows and produced a monster; then we see the art of Knossos, men leaping bulls and women handling snakes tranmogrifies into familiars who can assume these forms, mutates through the generations as "normals" try to control/exterminate the weirdos, and even explains why there is such a hatred for Mary Magdalene, her being Witch-Christ's familiar, and seven—seven!—Catholic churches resulting from the chaos of getting on top of the facts behind the legends. (I like the idea of the Pope in Belfast...Celtic Christianity seems to me a less virulent thing than the Roman variety.)
But Author Hawk, a transman, isn't likely to let us off that easily. The worldbuilding is the stage...the story is the people on it. And they are all in for it, poor lambs, because there's a wicked, vindictive worldbuilder at the helm and they will suffer for their bad luck in being summoned into life by him!
I've said above that I like and appreciate the way charcters in Author Hawk's series come back from their abeyance to inform the stories with an enhanced level of reality. You go around your life with the same, or a roughly similar, group of people in it...so do these folk. They have families, they have friends, they have bosses and co-workers...all is the same in these stories as in the stories of our lives. These characters, Isaac and Bill, have shown up briefly in other tales; Malachi, Dominic (ugh!), Nick and Jamie, Rook, Cicero...all make their presences know in here, too. It's so very warming, like seeing an old childhood friend on the streets of your vacation destination.
Family, birth family, comes in for a lot of knocks in this series. I am not the product of a happy family, so I think of this as merely a reflection of reality. Then there are the good birth families that exist here, too, like the Yates siblings. I suppose someone somewhere has one of those. They would be wise not to talk much about it lest they be placed in a zoo for us ordinaries to gawk at.
And of course, the role of the closet...Isaac the mastiff familiar being treated the way he was by Martin, the witch his magic longs to connect with, retreats into wounded silence about his essential nature; Bill, the rejected poor-quality witch-son, runs from even the least hint that he is a witch:
So Isaac had pulled away, before the inevitable rejection. Because he was spoiled, broken, unworthy. Bill surely knew it as well as Isaac did. Now he knew, too, that Isaac wanted him.
–and–
It was time to move on. Time to accept Isaac would never return his affection. Bill’s own da hadn’t wanted him; stupid to have imagined anyone else ever would.
Realizing that your own family rejects who you are ("love the sinner, hate the sin" is the cruelest and most invidious formulation of "I don't like who you are") is not a fast-track way to get your richly deserved portion of love on this Earth. And they've both got this obstacle to overcome, so Bill and Isaac aren't going to get together easily or quickly. As this story takes place two years-plus after the last, that was a given.
Category romance, laddies and gentlewomen. HEA is standard equipment.
I give nothing away when I say that the couple becomes one, then. The circumstances of that are for you to discover; as is Author Hawk's guaranteed twist on expectations. Bill's life isn't one of luxury but he at least had a mother who loved him. Isaac's life wasn't ordinary for many reasons, but his Jewish identity was always going to Other him no matter what. How these broken places mesh is a delight; how they learn to accept and value each other is a pleasure, if one that was slightly rushed by the demands of the adventure plot.
As always, the fight against evil-doers and vile malefactors is pursued on multiple fronts. This time there is a court case for Isaac to assist with, involving the poor trafficked familiars/slaves from earlier stories; there's also a larger conspiracy taking place that ties together the past, the present, and a dreadful authoritarian future that our Scooby-group of witches and familiars are aware of and fighting further back with each battle.
Martin's position in this story, pivotal on two fronts, is not one I want to spoil for you. The links of the larger story-arc are, as in all good series stories, growing more and more restrictive around our dramatis personae. And that explains my overall delight in and eagerness to push these reads at you.
And there is the basic human lovingkindness of the world these men inabit as well. They are there for, supportive of, each other; they accept the bonds of Family and carry them with willing hands and hearty acceptance of responsibility and for support. This is a world where someone says to a belovèd friend, “Sometimes strength means asking for help when you need it," and isn't criticizing or belitting him; reminding him, rather, that this is what he is being offered.
Isn't that a beautiful dream. Even in the midst of the pain and chaos of fighting an uncaring-to-cruel world for your existential survival, these men offer their own strength, their own lives, to help and support others.
Tell me, please, what kind of story could possibly be more 2021 than that.
