Another Guards of Folsom from Peterson

Since I live so close to Folsom, SJD Peterson's Guards of Folsom series has always intrigued me, especially since the Guards in her books is located in New York City even though one of the books took place in Florida.

This time around, the fourth Guards book starts out in California, closer to what I think of as the Guards of Folsom.  Here's an excerpt from my review of Roped, her latest, that was posted today at The Romance Reviews:

From California to New York City, two scions of a powerful motorcycle gang realize they are outcasts because of their love for one another.

This fourth book in the Guards of Folsom series begins in the small town of Chatom, California, where Gunner Cain, son of the leader of the Crimson 8 motorcycle gang, gets a TEK-9 as a birthday gift from his best friend Jamie Ryan for his eighteenth birthday and changes his name to Tek.

Since they've been together nearly since birth, Tek and Jamie share gang experiences as other children share playground antics. Although the Crimson 8 don't traffic in drugs any longer, they still defend their territory and are hard, violent men backed up by strong, sassy women.

But once Tek and Jamie kiss, they realize they are different from everyone in the gang because they are gay, and gays are definitely not tolerated in the group. As they ponder their options, they get more and more involved in gang activities, including murder.

Unable to reconcile their love for each other and the disdain of the group members towards gays, they steal some of the Crimson 8 funds and head to New York and a new, free life. There Tek gets a job as bouncer at the Guards of Folsom, a BDSM club, and the two from gangland California get an education about some of the possibilities in an alternative lifestyle.
Read the rest of the review at The Romance Reviews.

Two Review Day

Well, this is a first: Two of my reviews are featured on two different online sites.  Wow.

On the upside is Toy Run by Charley Descoteaux, one of Dreamspinner's Advent stories.  I opted to read three of the stories, and two of them turned out to be about Hanukkah, which even though it's celebrated over a number of days isn't really considered Advent material.

No matter.  Descoteaux's short story is a wonderfully cute mix of bikers, toys for children, and comfort and joy--all the ingredients for a happy holiday season.  It also includes three dogs, two bars, and rain and sleet in Oregon.  What's not to like, right?

The downside of the reviews is Brad Vance's A Little Too Broken, which should have been a spectacular story, but veered off into sex before settling the more important issues Vance tackles--double amputation, service dogs, HIV-positive lifestyle, and PTSD.  Somehow deciding how the protagonists will manage to have meaningful sex takes precedence over the more important details of how they will order their lives in order to live together for a few days, much less a lifetime.

If Vance decides to rework his novella, I'd love to reread it.  I hate to see potential like this go to waste.

No Fire Inside

Readers either love or hate author Kristen Ashley's work.  I was on the fence with her motorcycle gang quartet, the last of which was my favorite, Motorcycle Man.  In it there was a strange character named Hop Kincaid who was kind of an enforcer for the Denver gang.  An even more disturbing character was Lanie Heron who got shot defending a boyfriend who had gotten in too deep with the mob and wasn't worth the effort to stand beside.

Bringing them together in Fire Inside was definitely a risky proposition, a risk that didn't really pay off for me.  In fact, the further into the book I got, the more I realized that the story was merely a short story which had been blown up to novel size through repetition and inane plot twists, two ploys not up to Ashley's previous standards of writing.

So I've got to wonder why Ashley felt compelled to write the book.  Did fans want to see Lanie finally get a guy worth defending?  Did fans like Hop so much that he needed his own book?  Considering that she drew Hop in Sam Elliott's Fatal Beauty image, I feel that she does both Hop and Elliott a disservice.