BLUE STEEL CHAIN, an edgy, triggery entry into a charming series of romantic suspense novels

BLUE STEEL CHAIN
ALEX BEECROFT Trowchester Blues, #3
Riptide Publishing
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: At sixteen, Aidan Swift was swept off his feet by a rich older man who promised to take care of him for the rest of his life. But eight years later, his sugar daddy has turned from a prince into a beast. Trapped and terrified, Aidan snatches an hour’s respite at the Trowchester Museum.

Local archaeologist James Summers is in a failing long distance relationship with a rock star, and Aidan—nervous, bruised, and clearly in need of a champion—brings out all his white knight tendencies. When everything falls apart for Aidan, James saves him from certain death . . . and discovers a skeleton of another boy who wasn’t so lucky.

As Aidan recovers, James falls desperately in love. But though Aidan acts like an adoring boyfriend, he doesn’t seem to feel any sexual attraction at all. Meanwhile there are two angry exes on the horizon, one coming after them with the press and the other with a butcher’s knife. To be together, Aidan and James must conquer death, sex, and everyone’s preconceptions about the right way to love—even their own.

NOTE: The Trowchester Blues series features stand-alone titles that can be read in any order.

My Review: The stakes in this darker, more violent entry in the Trowchester Blues series could not possibly be higher. Aidan's life is in danger from the instant we meet him. His horrifying experiences as Piers's sex slave have reached crisis point. Pain and humiliation and viciousness are pale miseries compared to the violent escalation that Aidan precipitates by finding his very own friend unconnected to Piers in James the Trowchester archaeologist, familiar to us from his brief appearances in both previous novels. And there is no doubt whatever that Piers, the violent pedophile abuser, will make good on his ongoing threats to Aidan's life: No spoiler here, he's done it before. See publisher's synopsis.

James's own failing relationship is with self-absorbed rock musician Dave, a complete and utter bounder but not a murderous monster. James faces down the embarrassment of Dave's very uninterested and unloving attitude towards him with his accustomed acceptance. He finds he doesn't care much, is really only putting up with this nonsense on borrowed time. After all, the man he loves is being threatened with murderous intent by a stone-cold upper-class killer. That ain't a joke. Anything short of death threats? Pshaw! James will ride to the rescue! Blessedly, he does; he even leaves his dearly beloved entirely alone to find his way through a new world, one without rage and beatings, for himself. The fact that Aidan's new employer is James's bestie and a member of Finn's book club (now held at Finn and Michael's house on the canal) who willingly keeps James in the loop about Aidan's progress in his new life is making it easier, I'm sure. But it also keeps each man in a separate sphere of Romantic Self-Abnegation: I Shall Be Noble And Avoid My One True Love So That He May Find Himself/Get On With His Life.

And then it's time for reality. The harsh glare of terror dims down to the quotidian glow of spring sunshine and mellows into the lovely eternal tea-time of summer. Aidan discovers he's asexual. James discovers he has fallen head-over-heels in love for what seems to me to be the first time. And therein a significant rub: Party of the first part has only ever experienced sex as violence and party of the second part has only ever experienced love as sex.

I must pause here for an admission: I'm a bog-standard guy when it comes to sex. My sexual preference is more, and my orientation is towards whatever man I happen to be involved with, and asexual persons are not within my area of expertise. I do not get it. I don't have to, obviously, but I'm left utterly at sea as to how someone can have no sexual desire. I felt so sad for Aidan, and shouldn't have because he isn't broken or flawed or wrong, he's just not like me. And yet I am who I am: It makes me so sad that someone doesn't have the joy I experience in a strong, healthy sexual connection to my partner. Anyway, that's out of the way, on with the review bearing my inability to relate to the character's core identity in mind.

Aidan's life takes so many wonderful turns at this point...his newfound ability to relate to people, his new and exciting ability to support himself and to live as he pleases...that he decides to include James in his happiness. James is perfectly happy to have him there, since he's fallen hard for the man. Aidan, in his own way, is right there with James in the feeling realm:

Today James looked almost like a normal human being. He wore a tweed suit that should have looked ridiculous but in fact only cemented his resemblance to an absent-minded professor and resulted in a touching bohemianism. He had attempted to flatten out his hair with some kind of hair product, but fortunately it had fought back and was as distressed as ever. The day's heat had caused him to take his tie and jacket off and roll up his white sleeves, and the shape of his forearms seemed poetic to Aidan. His fingers itched to re-create the shape in art, to try to demonstrate to the world why James was so desperately important—why his existence said something that could not be said in any other way. Something everyone ought to hear.

That is, by anyone's standards, a man in love. Asexual maybe but a lover and a besotted one. Aidan has a wonderful eye for men, as does James. The men are having themselves a time there at the folk music festival; we see Billy and Martin, from Blue Eyed Stranger, on stage dancing their reconstructed Viking dances, James pointing them out as mates from the book club; there is such genuine joy in James now that he's there with Aidan that even though Aidan really doesn't much like the whole scene, he loves James and will learn not to hate it for his sake.

Another hiccup in their borning love comes when James, on taking Aidan home to his own place, expresses his love and gratitude for the evening that Aidan planned and executed for him with a kiss. Not a good idea. Spontaneous sexual gestures are complete triggers for Aidan. He has a massive meltdown on his front step, his protective housemates send James away with a flea in his ear, and things go from bad to worse when James gets home only to deal with a surprise of his own. Dave, whom James had thought well and truly thrown out never to return, has returned with his entourage, his new lover, and expects James to make his usual lifestyle adjustments to the whole insane clown posse.

The next day is the make-or-break point for the men. They have to clean up the messes of the lives they have never actually led but simply allowed to occur around them. They are each motivated to fix things up so they can get to the real fixing they want to do: Fix the other man into his own life, become the couple they cannot imagine not being. The major event that brings them together I won't reveal, but it was very satisfying. They fight their way into life together. They fight for their oddly assorted love. They come into a true and loving and satisfying life together, complete with strange corners and odd angles and the eternally unknowable alchemy of couplehood.

I am sad to see this series over. I don't know if Beecroft and Riptide plan to publish more of them, but I hope so. Trowchester could become the gay Barsetshire, and I for one would welcome it. There hasn't been an English setting as rich as Barsetshire since Mrs. Thirkell died in 1961. The time is ripe for one, and there couldn't be a better modern spin on the concept than one focused on gay men, lesbians (are we calling them gay women yet? I heard that was going to be the new thing), asexuals, transgender people, immigrants, and the whole lot whirling in a set of orbits that would make an astrophysicist dizzy.

Mrs Beecroft, I salute you for making in Aidan someone so powerful and amazingly appealing that even I, utterly alien to the concept of asexuality, could fall for him. Many many thanks for the hours of pleasure your books have already given me. Many more happy and creative years to you.

BLUE EYED STRANGER, another Trowchester Blues novel

BLUE EYED STRANGER
ALEX BEECROFT Trowchester Blues, #2
Riptide Publishing
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Billy Wright has a problem: he’s only visible when he’s wearing a mask. That’s fine when he’s performing at country fairs with the rest of his morris dancing troupe. But when he takes the paint off, his life is lonely and empty, and he struggles with crippling depression.

Martin Deng stands out from the crowd. After all, there aren’t that many black Vikings on the living history circuit. But as the founder of a fledgling historical re-enactment society, he’s lonely and harried. His boss doesn’t like his weekend activities, his warriors seem to expect him to run everything single-handedly, and it’s stressful enough being one minority without telling the hard men of his group he’s also gay.

When Billy’s and Martin’s societies are double-booked at a packed county show, they know at once they are kindred spirits, united by a deep feeling of connectedness to their history and culture. But they’re also both hiding in their different ways, and they need each other to be brave enough to take their masks off and still be seen.

NOTE: The Trowchester Blues series features stand-alone titles that can be read in any order.

My Review: Unstoppable force, this is immovable object. Advise your trajectory can now continue unimpeded.

History geek Martin meets morris dancer Billy. Each is hella hot for the other. Problem 1: Martin's a half-Sudanese/half-Yorkshireman Viking warrior re-enactor. Not exactly the best candidate for romantic kissy-face, more the hot sweaty sex type, oh and shelve that hand-holding lark. Problem 2: Billy suffers the agonizing, debilitating curse of depression. It's all he can do most days to haul himself out of bed and there are times even that isn't on. Problem 3: They can't reach around their barriers to get at each other consistently despite a near-desperate need for the other man's being.

Add in the immigrant parent with impossibly high expectations, the hostile work environment, and the curse of trying to lift words out of the stygian gloom of broken souls...well. It's all I can do to put the book down long enough to tell you to go get it and read it and defy you not to fall in love with these marvelous men before re-reading it.

Yep. Thass right. I, the arch-advocate of "too many new pretties, don't bother me with that re-reading thing" am going to re-read this book as soon as I close my computer because I absolutely can. not. WAIT. to re-experience the ending of this book.

Yep. Thass right. I, the ever-whinging arch-complainer about the unsatisfactoriness of endings that either tie things up tight with Honey Boo-Boo bows or leave so many threads dangling that they resemble old-fashioned fringed vests (waistcoats to y'all Brits) am going to re-savor the beautiful, beautiful ending Ma Beecroft has imagined for this book.

Oh, and that missing half-star? It's the same place that the missing thirty thousand or so words dedicated to Martin's family, Billy's morris dancing side, and the gents' mutual projects are. I'd glower about it some but I'd be fronting. I love what's here enough to demand more. Brevity might well be the soul of lingerie, but it's not on when you're immersed in a deeply satisfying read.

Oh, and the book club crossover is on that list as well. Better pump the MIA count up to thirty-five thou.

TROWCHESTER BLUES, a tale of the rightness of love shared

TROWCHESTER BLUES
ALEX BEECROFT (Trowchester Blues, #1)
Riptide Publishing
$17.99 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Michael May is losing it. Long ago, he joined the Metropolitan Police to escape his father’s tyranny and protect people like himself. Now his father is dead, and he’s been fired for punching a suspect. Afraid of his own rage, he returns to Trowchester—and to his childhood home, with all its old fears and memories. When he meets a charming, bohemian bookshop owner who seems to like him, he clings tight.

Fintan Hulme is an honest man now. Five years ago, he retired from his work as a high class London fence and opened a bookshop. Then an old client brings him a stolen book too precious to turn away, and suddenly he’s dealing with arson and kidnapping, to say nothing of all the lies he has to tell his friends. Falling in love with an ex-cop with anger management issues is the last thing he should be doing.

Finn thinks Michael is incredibly sexy. Michael knows Finn is the only thing that still makes him smile. But in a relationship where cops and robbers are natural enemies, that might not be enough to save them.

NOTE: The Trowchester Blues series features stand-alone titles that can be read in any order.

My Review: Dear Mrs Beecroft,

A long time ago I bought a Christmas tree from a fireman. He carried the tree to the car, put it in the trunk, tied the lid down with some twine, and before he was through making the last knot (four in total...I said I was traveling a half mile, wasn't that enough knots already?) he asked for my phone number.

It was a wonderful few months.

I mentioned what happened next in my earlier review of your book CAPTAIN'S SURRENDER. Frank was shaken, changed, by the honesty, the clarity, the truth that you told in that book's most perfect (to me, of course) moment: Peter's coming out as a lover of men, a man, to himself and to his god. I still give people who need it copies of CAPTAIN'S SURRENDER. It hasn't failed me yet. That specific facet of your story has comforted four more hurting souls after Frank's response proved to me that there is healing in being seen and being loved.

I hope that fact fills you with pride and happiness. It does me. That it was your second novel amazed me then and amazes me now. I am happy to say that the pleasures of reading your novels has only increased as time has gone by and you've written steadily and well.

I've come to expect from you that gift of seeing the moment when depth is too deep, and when gloss is too glib; your ability to balance them is one of the unteachable gifts that you possess. I recommend your books to people based on that fine balance. But then there's the thing that I don't tell them. I just leave the lucky sods to discover it for themselves:

Shame was perhaps ninety percent of the weight lodged under May's breastbone where a heart should be, but he had enough experience of the stuff to know the shame was only a sugar coating on something more insidious, so deep, so hollow he often wondered why he didn't just implode. Take himself out of existence, like a soap bubble with all the air sucked out. Right at this moment, he'd welcome it. Stop thinking. Stop hurting. Stop being him. That would be fantastic.

I can't guess how you know with such intimacy the exact experience of toxic shame. I can say that your finely honed words that are both funny and horribly painful, encapsulate fully the experience as I know it. And again I say that there is healing in being seen, being loved...being created as your character Michael May was in your accepting imagination.

May returning to Trowchester, where he never drew a happy breath, makes a lot of sense in the context of a man hollowed out by a rough life seeing the least and the lowest in constant action. He's down near the bottom of the well already and there's nothing to lose by going to a place that taught him the worthlessness of happiness and the falseness of hope:

When [Jenny, his best friend] signed off, the place felt emptier, lonelier, a million miles away from anywhere. The boat looked bare and the bed cold. He tried sitting on it, but in the small space the curving walls seemed to be clenching around him, crushing him. He wondered how long it would take before whatever it was that was gnawing away at his insides would finally swallow them and let him die.

I think we're all, those of us broken and hollow and stinging with the pain of a parent's emotional abuse, familiar with the no-space-can-be-big-enough problem. You put it so well...the cold bed, the clenched walls, the apparatus of protection being made the mechanism of abuse...is any act more cruel than depriving another soul of the ability to find comfort in the place that we must all return to, our home? If there is, I don't know about it, and I don't want to.

But May isn't the only one whose life you're excavating to such good effect. Finn the ever-so-slightly bent boy-man whose long dark night of the soul came from the darker paths that his love of beauty led him down. Yes, like Michael's, his life was deeply and unnervingly flawed by his inability to resist the lure of the object even when its provenance was clearly tainted. His cultured soul recoils only from ugliness, brutality, not from legal niceties that mean nothing when matched against a palette of perfect beauty and the unique historical presence of objects. Finn will do anything to possess a perfect object, because he is imperfect. Criminality? Pfui. Pettifogging bureaucratic nonsense.

Until the day he loses more than his illusions can support. Again, I can't guess how you know with such intimacy what happens when one loses a partner. Far as I'm aware your husband is hale and hearty and bids fair to see your grandchildren married. But wherever it comes from, your knowledge of that loss's effects on the entire rest of a man's life is spot-on. After Finn loses his illicit career as well as his beautiful love Tom and runs away to Trowchester, you leave him alone for five whole years. That feels so familiar. Finn won't rush into anything serious because, well, there can't be anything worse than the disappointment of let-down, can there? You said it so well, in this moment after Finn, in short order, suffers many body-blows to his hard-won peace, not to mention an attempt on his life that damages his bookshop, and all without his Michael to protect him:

Bathing and dressing in clean clothes did a little to alleviate his mood, but not even eating bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade and coffee did anything to fill the hollow inside him, where everything that he was had drawn itself deep inside, retreated, squeezing itself together in a singularity of soul so buried he couldn't tell if he was angry or sad or calm.

There's really nothing much to say after that, is there, except "however it is that you know that sensation so intimately, I am sorry."

Finn has depths he doesn't visit too terribly often, depths of deeply sentimental and shockingly sincere lovingkindness. His is the kind of smiling, bright face that no one thinks to wonder what propels the wattage out, they just bask in the warmth and dread the flares. He quite simply can't not help when his help is necessary. He somehow knew that a shadowy lurker around his home was a soul in need, and he's been leaving a meal for the shadow without ever knowing the lost soul's identity. His grace is knowing when to poke and pry and when not to. His ghost has, in the whirl of events, vanished...but his concern has not:

"And you used to put dinner out on the table most nights, when you was eating yours." Her smile wavered and crumpled. Her eyes filled with tears all of a sudden. "And I used to eat it, and I'd look up, and I'd see you sometimes in the window. And it would be...It would be like I wasn't alone."

She raised her hands to her face, made a sound like a laugh until it escalated into racking sobs. Finn's own eyes watered in response.

"You're my ghost?" He didn't stop to think, just stepped forward and threw his arms around her. She stiffened briefly and then turned into him, burying her head in his shoulder, as she wept. "You're my ghost! I've been so worried. When you stopped coming I thought something bad had happened to you. I didn't know—" He looked up over her shoulder to Michael who was looking stunned and suspiciously glossy-eyed behind her.

"I can't believe it." He had a good cry himself, for joy mostly. His eyes were closed when Michael slipped his arms around them both and briefly held them both up. Then there was embarrassment and overly bright, overly cheerful voices as he passed Sarah his handkerchief, and Jenny picked the spilled coats off the floor, and insisted on a hug of her own.

I see what you did there: You made a family from the detritus of unmet needs and unwanted feelings. I am as sentimental a sod as they make 'em, and that just about perfectly met my need for the pieces to be picked up and made into a work of kintsugi by a mistress of the art.

There is a rightness to a story deeply felt, properly told, and burnished to a soft gleaming imperfect warmth. It lets me in, lets me inhabit the characters as I wish and as my needs demand. It isn't a common effect in any field of writing. It is a sensation that I have come to expect when reading your books...and I'm pretty much all caught up on your to-date output...and that is the reason I come back for more. Moments like this:

Michael had risen to his feet before it occurred to him that he should not be taking orders from Finn. He had a bizarre flash of mythology, the thought that if he was a fucking animal at times, maybe together, with Finn's controlling hand on the reins, they could be a centaur.

Well. That's me destroyed. You, kind lady, you reached southwestward from your northerly latitudes and delicately flensed from my hiding place the secret of my joy. I wonder if my cynical wounded self will have another Michael, be another Finn; it's almost enough to have your enfolding generous imagination include me in the world.

Oh dear, that was rather earnestly American of me, wasn't it. You will simply have to dig deep under your proper lady's reserve and forgive a heartfelt statement of admiration from,

Your fanboy,

Richard

PS if you're wondering where the missing half-star on this review is, it's the same place as the missing twenty thousand or so words dedicated to the Lis, to Sarah, to the book club boys are. (Yes, I know, James is coming, but it's not enough!) And while I, book magistrate, have determined that you have no case to answer, I strongly caution you that old American fanboys deprived of a return visit from Michael, Finn, Jenny, Sarah, and the rest of this cast could result in unwished-for squatter tents in your front garden. Complete with curmudgeonly glowers.