It also includes two short stories that are part of the worlds in my existing series, the Rough Series and Mexican Heat Series. These stories range from military men to computer nerd, tackling DADT to private fantasies, a kidnapping and an attempt to survive a natural disaster. The most recent title is Jackson & Nick from the Storming Love: Wild Fire Series in 2015.

There are no new stories in this collection, just time-worn, in some cases award-winning, shorts. Continue reading → 3.Manlove is a single author collection of some of my short stories pulled together from other out-of-print anthologies. If anyone hasn’t read this series I easily recommend it and even more so recommend this particular narrator who is good. For now, I liked the opener book a lot but it had some glaring plot problems at the end. I’m curious how I’ll feel about the series as a whole when I’m done. I definitely forgot more than I remembered about the series, characters, and mysteries so in some ways I’m reading with an open mind and no preconceived notions. I found more problems than I remember noticing but overall it was as good as I remember and I was absorbed right away. I know I liked the series and that feeling has continued with this reading. I was then even more surprised that I hadn’t reviewed this series before so here I am. I’ve been re-reading books I quite liked previously and was excited to see that the Adrien English series from Josh Lanyon was on audiobook. Once again the narrator is really the shinning star with both Adrien as a great character and Patton being an excellent narrator. It’s a good book and the personal relationships Adrien has steal the show with a mildly interesting, if convoluted, mystery as the backdrop. Thus we meet a new love interest for Adrien, which is nice, and his new overwhelmingly blonde and perky sisters in law in between him running around trying to solve a satan-worshipping case. It’s clear these two are not “together” in the strictest sense and it’s not surprising when the final confrontation happens. Jake breaks up with Adrien late in the book but the writing is on the wall almost from the start.

The scenes they did have were dramatic and stunning, which kind of made me want to cry that there weren’t more. Except this time there wasn’t much to these two.

It allows for a pretty lengthy investigation to occur before the resolution and thus plenty of time for Jake and Adrien to have their relationship drama.

I think the mystery in THYS was stronger than the previous book but still kind of convoluted, as that seems to be a running theme in this series.

Mexican Heat by Laura Baumbach