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.
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.
Michael May is having a bad day and by the end of it, he is
no longer a MET officer in London, and heading home to the fourth smallest city
in the country where is dad has left him a house, and boat yard. While there
and clearing out the junk his late father accumulated over the years, he’s
struck by old flashback memories of is unhappy childhood and ghosts of his
past. He runs into a book seller, Finn and together they help Michael discover
not only the ghost, but help Finn resolve some issues in his own past.
Ok, I really wanted to like this story, I can’t put my
figure on what I didn’t enjoy but I didn’t. I’ve read tons of British authors
and growing up in England I have no problem with reading the different styles
of writing and verbiage. I just couldn’t connect with these characters. Michael was pleasant enough, Finn was
charming. The bad guy’s just evil enough. And I would have enjoyed having Tea
in the tea shop. Two more in the series, I’ll give them an ago because I really
do think I would like them.
OK, I admit it, I'm a failure. I was going
to make an 8 Tracks playlist for Trowchester Blues and then post it here with a
rundown of why I chose each song. It would have been great. I have a friend who
makes great playlists, where all the tracks are lovely, I've heard none of them
before and immediately have to go buy half of them, and the lyrics and mood of
the songs are uncannily perfect for the characters.
I should have asked her to make this for
me, but I'm bad at asking people for things too. So, instead I'm going to take
a crack at coming up with five songs that sum the book up, and linking to them
on YouTube.
This is probably going to be beyond me too,
but here goes. The first thing I think about when I think about the book is
Michael. For Michael I want something that reflects his attempt to exorcise the
ghost of his bad dad, so that could be something like this:
Down with the Sickness by Disturbed.
Except that's a mum and not a dad, and
Michael, even though he's terrified that he is turning into the monster that
his father was, isn't. The sound of it's very good though, all
that black, bleak desperation and rage.
The trouble is that makes him sound far too
aggressive, because really he's a big softy inside. I think of him as a big sad
dog, although perhaps something of a Rottweiler. I googled songs about
depression in an attempt to find something a bit softer that might sum him up
as he is at the beginning of the book. This one made me laugh
It's not bad, but the funny thing about it
is the line “Does your love only come,
does your love only come, does he only come in a Volvo?” because Michael does in fact drive a Volvo, so
really that line belongs to Finn.
I'm not doing well, am
I? I've spent two hours, got two songs and neither of them are exactly right.
Let's see if we can do
any better for Finn.
Apart from the fact
that Michael's shoulders are roughly the size of Poland, this one is the best
I've managed so far, even down to the fact that it's something he might enjoy
listening to himself. He does have a distressing tendency towards easy
listening.
Now, is there a song
that sums up 'I'm an honest man now, but seduce me with your stolen books
anyway, because I'll brave arson and kidnapping for a good manuscript'? I don't
know. I don't know where I would even start looking.
Maybe it could be
distilled down a little. He's maybe a bit of a trickster character, in the
sense that he's indomitable and not entirely wedded to the idea of straightforward
honesty. Is there anything I can find that encompasses that?
Ooh, look, yes I can.
This is my closest yet. It's perhaps a bit too spooky for Finn, who is a
charming sweetheart of a trickster, though he shares that element of 'lets just
burn the world down' when he gets scared.
I'm making this sound
like quite a grim book, aren't I? And while that's true in parts, the overall
thrust of the thing is hopeful and, I hope, kind of comforting. What kind of
can I find for that?
Well, there's always this:
Which I think Michael
would consider romantic, and Finn might laugh at for its earnestness, but find
touching anyway.
And then again there's
this:
Because at the heart of
it it's a book about two scarred and lonely people finding a haven in each
other, and a tune about curling up together on a Sunday Morning while the rain
falls outside is probably closest of all.
How about that? Six
tunes. It is almost a playlist, and it only took me almost as long as it would
have done to write two thousand words. I think I'll stick to the writing next
time!
Alex Beecroft is an English author best known for historical
fiction, notably Age of Sail, featuring gay characters and romantic storylines.
Her novels and shorter works include paranormal, fantasy, and contemporary
fiction.
Beecroft won Linden Bay Romance’s (now Samhain Publishing)
Starlight Writing Competition in 2007 with her first novel, Captain’s
Surrender, making it her first published book. On the subject of writing gay
romance, Beecroft has appeared in the Charleston City Paper, LA
Weekly, the New Haven Advocate, the Baltimore City Paper, and The
Other Paper. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists' Association of the UK
and an occasional reviewer for the blog Speak Its Name, which highlights
historical gay fiction.
Alex was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and
grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She lives with
her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to
avoid being mistaken for a tourist.
Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She
has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and
recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still
hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.
She is represented by Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Literary
Agency.
Really looking forward to this read! Thanks for the giveaway!
ReplyDeleteThanks for the post and song list. Unfortunately, I could not read half of it as the text was black against the black and white background. Maybe it is just a problem with my system...
ReplyDeleteI have Trowchester Blues on my TBR list. It sounds great.
jen.f {at} mac {dot} com
I'm sorry about the coding errors. They are now fixed.
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