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All Four Foothills Pride Novellas in One Paperback Edition

On August 17, Foothills Pride Stories, Vol. 1, will be released by Dreamspinner Press. The paperback volume will include What's in a Name?, Redesigning Max, Behr Facts, and When Adam Fell, the first four Foothills Pride novellas.

What’s in a Name?: Barista Jimmy Patterson falls for bartender Guy Stone. Do coffee and booze make a happy ever after?

Redesigning Max: Interior designer Fredi Zimmer remodels Max Greene’s mountain cabin and the outdoorsman himself, but everything’s not peaceful as they find love.

Behr Facts: When someone tries to scam contractor Abe Behr, accountant Jeff Mason comes to the rescue. Big, burly, bearish Abe never thought he’d come to rely on anyone else, much less handsome Jeff.

When Adam Fell: TV Chef Adam de Leon left his longtime lover in San Francisco. Now David is back saying he’s no longer a junkie and is ready for forever this time. Can David be believed?

When more information becomes available, I'll post it here. To buy the novellas individually, use the links on the titles or at the right of this post.

Foothills Pride #5 Coming Soon

Relative Best, the latest Foothills Pride story, is releasing from Dreamspinner Press on August 17, 2016. And I am so excited to announce this!

Here's what the book's about:

Sometimes love sneaks up when you’re least looking for it….

Zeke Bandy, owner of the Bandy’s Finest Hotel in Old Town Stone Acres, California, is too busy for love. Not only does he oversee the operations of the historic hotel and uphold his family’s tradition of offering refuge to strays and runaways, Zeke also sings and plays down-home music two nights a week at the Stonewall Saloon and for occasional celebrations. Then Zeke meets Victor Longbow, the man of his dreams.

Vic isn’t looking for love either. In fact, because of his upbringing in a strict, white foster home, Vic’s not sure he believes in love. He’s in Stone Acres to open a branch office of a national brokerage firm. He’s also hoping to find a vintage photo of what might be his Native American ancestor.

After their paths cross,  they become friends, then more. Connected by their experiences as orphans raised by flawed fathers, Zeke and Vic realize that some men must find love, hone it, and create families for themselves.

There are no ARCs or preorder links at this time, but I'll be sure to add preorder and any other information as it trickles in.

Mixing and Matching

Coming up is the paperback edition of the first four books in the Foothills Pride series. The compilation is titled Foothills Pride Stories, Vol. 1, and even writing that I feel a little like Quentin Tarantino and the Kill Bill movies. Although if you haven't read the Foothills Pride series, don't expect anything remotely like Tarantino. The blood count is much, much lower in the FP series.

At any rate, AngstyG is working up a cover that melds the Old Town map and the Stonewall Saloon. Since the series starts off with What's in a Name? and the first chapter begins in the saloon, I think it's only fitting that the cover of volume 1 be the image of Stone's bike and his business.

So for those wondering what the two separate images look like, here they are. Now we'll see what AngstyG can do to make these two become one.

Updating Beauty and the Beast

Reading Challenge: June 18 - Romance Classics (classic book, classic author, classic trope/theme etc.)

Running Scarred

by Jackie Williams
Stars: 2

I love variations on the Beauty and the Beast theme.  For that reason, I thought Jackie Williams' Running Scarred sounded like fun.

First of all, she's British, and I thought a British take on the universal fairytale would be interesting.  Secondly, her hero, Patrick Reeves--nicknamed Superman because of the film actor's last name--is an British soldier who was disfigured when a bomb blew up unexpectedly, which is a modern twist on the Beast idea. 

As can be imagined, Patrick is bitter, not just about the fact that his comrades died and that he lost a leg and has burn scars on his face and body, but also because his wife of ten years left him when she saw him in the hospital.

Patrick now lives in the gardener's cottage on the grounds of a decayed French chateau away from everyone but the nearby villagers.  His peace is disturbed one night when beautiful British Ellen tromps through the woods near his cottage as she stomps away from her fiancé.

Multi-millionaire Ellen has recently discovered that her fiancé doesn't love her and has been using her to get control of her fortune.  While this is disturbing, Ellen has more important things on her mind. 

She's searching for a building to buy in order to turn it into a luxury resort hotel where wounded British veterans, their families, and friends can come for vacation without outsiders staring at them.  She plans for her brother and his friends, all wounded veterans, to help her vet the place once she's made repairs and added upgrades.

It's a wonderful premise.  Unfortunately, questions abound.  These are just a very few I had while reading the book:

* Why does Ellen decide to buy this chateau which has almost no usable rooms in it and which is a crumbling shell?  Surely, there are secluded houses that are in better repair in both England and France.  Her attraction to Patrick can't be that strong after a few hours seeing him one night.

* After Patrick finds out that Ellen's brother is a double amputee and the brother's friends are also wounded veterans, why does Patrick still battle Ellen and her attraction to him?  At times he comes off as churlish rather than charming.  And the smell of a real man and the sight of Patrick's broad shoulders, reasons why Ellen begins to love him, don't seem enough to attract anyone.

* Why does it take Ellen so long to figure out her fiancé just wants her money?  She's already bought a Spanish resort that he talked her into and, against her wishes, let him put his name on the deeds.  She also bought her own engagement ring and just about everything else in their relationship.  How dense can one woman be?

Those are only three of the many questions running around in my head as I read the book.  I wanted so much to like it since I love the Beauty and the Beast premise, but this book didn't do it for me at all, despite having such a promising contemporary Beast.

Hopefully I'll find a more compelling and less troubling use of the old fairytale in the future.

Hilarious Semester Abroad

From my review of Anne Tenino's Poster Boy that ran today at All About Romance:

The fifth in the Theta Alpha Gamma (TAG) fraternity series is a delicious romp with the frat boys in France, taking classes and causing hilarious concern as they forget the problems back home Calapooya College where their frat house burned down.

TAG member Tank's brother Jock, a gifted hockey player, was outed at his former college when a photo of him and another guy in a compromising position was sent to Jock's coach. Afterward the coach kicked Jock off the team, ostensibly for partying which broke school rules, but really for being gay.

Consequently, Tank convinced Jock to transfer to Calapooya and the fraternity which had adopted a gay-friendly membership policy. While the pro hockey teams that had been courting him and other groups want to make a poster boy of Jock, he adamantly refuses to do so, mainly because he's just recently admitted to himself and his family that he's gay. Straight Tank introduces his brother to Brad, who clues Jock into what it's like to be gay and have sex with another guy. Brad also introduces Jock to history grad student Toby, who's had a lot of lovers at the campus. Toby, however, is having problems with his master's thesis and is about to be kicked out of school, so while he's attracted to Jock and feels a special pull to him, Toby's trying to get himself together so he can graduate.

When Jock decides to go to the Provence campus for the end of the spring semester to get away from the media attention his outing has caused and Toby agrees to chaperone the TAG members in order to get some writing on his thesis done, the stage is set for frat boy fun while inexperienced Jock gets together with very experienced Toby.

This is the best of the Theta Alpha Gamma series, primarily because both Jock and Toby are such likeable characters and the problems they are wrestling with are so immediate and important.

Read the rest of the review at All About Romance.

Provincetown Romance Turns to Purple Prose

While I was at the Romantic Times convention, this review of Jacob Z. Flores' latest, When Love Comes to Town, ran at The Romance Reviews:

In the 4th Provincetown romance, Flores falls under the spell of purple prose and Family Week at the gay resort.

Brody O'Shea, last seen as Teddy's boyhood lover in When Love Gets Hairy, is the odd man out as family and friends gather for the marriage of Zach and Van whose romance was central in When Love Takes Over.

Brody is particular about who he will love, but not with whom he shares a night of sex. His parents left him with a skewed image of marriage, so as Brody has worked his way through the Provincetown offerings, he's kept a list of the things he wants and doesn't want in a partner. At the top of his list is a man without children.

Eric Vasquez, a cop who two years before lost his husband, is bringing his daughter Mattie to his cousin Van's wedding from a small town across the state of Massachusetts. When Eric gets there and sees how many of Van and Zach's friends are paired up, he misses his husband who died in an accident even more.

But as the odd men out, Brody and Eric are paired up more and more as the wedding plans come together. As they do, both come to change their minds about what they thought were important considerations: Brody finds he likes Mattie and has formed a bond with her, and Eric realizes that his husband would want him to go on living, not pining for the rest of his life.

Jacob Z. Flores' mix of humor and fond depictions of what initially seem shallow men who end up showing amazing depth is at the forefront of this novel as it has been in his others.

Read the rest of the review at The Romance Reviews.

A Hard Look at a Conspiracy Romance

Hard as It Gets, the first of the Hard Ink series finds the adult daughter of a Special Forces colonel who led his men into an ambush pairing up with the men who survived the set-up in order to find her abducted brother in this repetitious thriller.

Baltimore nurse Becca Merritt is alarmed when her brother Charlie goes missing, and when she visits his apartment, she finds his place ransacked.

Charlie has told her to get in touch with someone at the Hard Ink tattoo parlor should anything happen to him. There she meets tattoo artist Nick Rixey, who recently served under her father, and asks Nick to help her locate her brother. Although wounded veteran Nick despises Frank Merritt - who betrayed him and the rest of the men under his command - Nick grudgingly agrees to help Becca.

Things go from bad to worse as Becca's house is also ransacked and they discover after she reports the break-ins to the police that all official record of her reports about her brother's disappearance and the destruction of both their places has been erased. Then Becca is attacked at the hospital where she works and afterward Charlie's little finger is sent to her. Knowing that he needs help in rescuing Charlie, Nick calls the other surviving members of her father's team, and they work to unravel what Charlie knows and how to get him back.

Becca is an interesting combination of scared and brave, not really wanting to trust Nick and his wounded crew and not knowing that her father set them up. She's the superwoman to Nick's classic superman, the soldier who plans and fights extra competently on little sleep and even less food. It definitely helps that Becca is a nurse, especially when she needs to bandage up Nick and his crew or when Charlie's finger is sent to her, which, while scaring her, also incites her. It's also fortunate that she knows how to defend herself and use a gun. Even with all these attributes, however, she still needs Nick's help because - just like Charlie hinted - there is a conspiracy surrounding them.

Read the rest of my review at All About Books.

Two Book Reviews Posted Today

The stars must be aligning because two of my reviews are running today.

Unfortunately, Forty-Two Stairs doesn't publish until June 2014, but it's like everything else I've read by A. F. Henley--brilliant.  If you've never tried reading a gay romance novel because you really don't want to know anything about gay sex, then this is a book I'd recommend.  While the two men acknowledge that they have sex, it isn't described in depth, at least not as in depth as so many of the straight contemporary romances I've been reading these days.  Instead, Forty-Two Steps is an honest look at overcoming addiction--that it's not the program but the person who makes the difference.  Here's an excerpt from The Romance Reviews:

There might be 12 steps to the AA program, but for Owen, a recovering alcoholic, the 42 stairs leading up to his new apartment are the real challenge.

Owen started drinking heavily when he was a teen, but it took two DUI's and nearly killing people in another car as well as a judge's sentence to persuade him to get his life in order. In the process, Owen, who's in his early thirties, loses his boyfriend Eli, his house, his money, and job while picking up a mountain of debt as a result of legal expenses, fines and penalties.

What he retained was an AA sponsor, his loyal younger brother Dennis, who helps him move into a minuscule low-rent apartment, and 42 stairs from ground floor up to his new life.

On move-in day, Owen meets Sebastian who has the apartment below his. In his mid-twenties, Sebastian, with his purple hair, elfin face, and artistic nature, is completely out of Owen's experience as a former white collar worker with a flashy car and elegant home. More than anything, Sebastian challenges Owen to find out who he really is and what he wants out of life.

How the Fake Becomes Real

Reading Challenge / April 2014: Contemporary Romance

Pull Me Under by Zarah Detand
Rating: B+

After a video of Ben, a famous footballer who's closeted, dancing with a guy goes viral, his manager suggests Ben get a fake boyfriend to show what an upstanding guy he is.  Henry accepts the challenge of becoming Ben's ersatz love because he admires Ben and wants to help him.  This doesn't go over well with James, who's in love with Henry and sees his "sacrifice" in becoming Ben's media boyfriend as too much.

The story on the surface revolves around how Ben and Henry get together as real lovers and overcome their fake relationship to find happiness.  But on a deeper level it's the story of how Ben grows up and stops believing his publicity in order to become himself.

What Ben and Henry don't understand at the beginning of the book is that Henry is in love with Ben's media image.  When that image changes from interesting footballer to gay sports icon, Henry falls even deeper in love with the fake Ben.

Consequently, both men have to change.  Both must look beneath the fame, money, and media images to find who they really are in order to come together on a level that is potentially lasting.  Until they do, not only are they cardboard cutouts but their relationship is too.

Detand is masterful in writing Ben's stream-of-consciousness first-person narrative.  Ben's at once puffed up with his sports prowess yet still uncomfortable with his success.  He has great rapport with his teammates and other athletes but is unsure of himself with anyone else.  He's self-conscious enough to be aware that maybe he isn't as great as the media think he is.  And that's a troubling thought.

Henry, on the surface, seems like a saint, putting up with Ben's often larger than life ego.  But Henry's got a secret agenda.  Henry can see how important Ben is to gay boys and men everywhere.  Henry knows that he's the one responsible for keeping Ben from becoming outrageous and embarrassing himself and everyone around him.  Ben's image is important to the gay cause, and Henry's there to help him keep that image clean.

James who wants Henry to be his boyfriend and is contemptuous of Ben is the third interesting character in this romance.  James sees Ben as a buffoon who should be ignored.  He can't understand why Henry would want to protect and promote Ben at all since as far as James is concerned there's nothing real about the footballer at all.  Instead of seeing how Ben's potentially a good role model, James sees him as a setback to the cause.

Although it took me a while to get into the first person streaming presentation, I very much enjoyed this book because it brought an entirely new look at gay athletes and their part as role models in society, especially since some of these athletes aren't the most mature or thoughtful people.  Maybe some of them really do need Henrys to make them think like adults and not just party and respond like teens.

What's Erotica and What's Not?

A few years back I was blown away by an interesting contemporary romance that revolved around weight, Heavy Issues by Elle Ayecart.  The book was classified as erotica, a classification that perhaps Loose ID, the publisher, probably tagged it.

Like Deep Down, the latest Ayecart, the designation of erotica bothers me because so many of the Regency romances I was reading at the same time I read Heavy Issues were as erotic if not more so.  At the time I wasn't quite sure what made erotica erotica.  Now I'm even less sure.

The sex scenes in Deep Down are no more detailed or lusty than those found in the run-of-the-mill contemporary or historical romance.  If plot and not sex is the issue, then again erotica, at least Ayecart's erotica, is less erotic than every other romance published today.  Deep Down features the same angst-ridden couple who share a Big Misunderstanding.

In fact, the only thing that separates Deep Down from probably every other lusty contemporary or historical today is the trio of grandmothers, whose sometimes nearly slapstick antics lighten the otherwise fairly typical plot.

I'm wondering if erotica is a subgenre of the past.  Has its time come and gone already?

Love and Angst in Britain

I can't image having a sister hit by a car and losing her identity the way Lyddie does in Sue Moorcroft's Is This Love?  Being the younger sister and witnessing a bright older sister regress to having the mind of a child for the rest of her life must be unusually difficult.


As the oldest sister in my immediate family and the oldest cousin on my father's side of the family, I've seen death come too many times among my contemporaries.  While death takes a chunk out of one's heart, the hole is less painful as the years pass although it never goes away.


But to see someone regress like Lyddie did in the novel, I'm not sure would be as easy to reconcile.  Lyddie's sister Tamara in the novel seems to be a saint in how she helps her parents work with Lyddie and how she keeps from getting totally frustrated and angry with her older sister.  I'm not sure I could step up and be as accommodating as Tamara.


Perhaps the real story in the novel is how yoga helps Tamara, who is an instructor, live life without having to run into a nearby green space and yell.  Maybe as my daughter has been telling me for years, yoga really is the answer.

Meeting the Father of the Bride

Cute meets are the order of the day.  L. B. Gregg's How I Met Your Father stretches the cute meet into sleaze territory and then treats the whole "I had sex with the father of the bride in the handicapped bathroom at the airport" as a joke.  But that's exactly what Gregg meant this to be.

Having read and reviewed about 55 gay romances in 2013, I thought I was fairly immune to immaturity and raunchy behavior in men, but Gregg's sketchy comedy left me scratching my head and wondering what was funny.

I guess this is another example of comedy being in the eye of the beholder.  The book, however, does go a long way to explain why American mating rituals and nuptials are a joke to the rest of the world.  With a promiscuous father and no mother to speak of, the bride in this particular book seems perfectly understandable marrying her college instructor, a former boy band member.

Believing that the currently happy couple have even a smidgen of a chance at happily ever after is beyond the bounds of suspension of disbelief.  If anyone does believe theirs will be a happy future, then anything is possible.  My only caution is to watch out for flying pigs.