Ravi Abhiramnew’s job is simple: hunt down and neutralize supernatural threats. That is until he meets Cayenne, a charismatic time traveler who claims to know everything about him—even his most closely guarded secrets.
Going to dinner with Cayenne is probably a bad idea, and a romantic island getaway definitely is.
When a monster picks their resort as its hunting ground, Ravi’s combat skills and Cayenne’s time magic should make it a breeze to kill the monster and get their vacation back on track. But it turns out the real danger lurks much, much closer…
Review:
Dear Fox Beckman,
I enjoyed your retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” so much that I went out and looked for your other books. The only one I found was this one. I one clicked without reading any reviews, more over I have not even read the blurb, just because the writing was so good in the previous book and I was so eager to see if this one would be just as well written and enjoyable.
Readers, first of all please beware that this is a first part of the trilogy. At the end of this one there is no happy ending, I mean it is not a tragic ending, the characters part ways because needs must (that’s the most I can do without spoilers), not because they had any fight at the end of the book.
So, because I bought this book without even reading the blurb first (something that I don’t do for the 99% of the potential purchases), I have had an interesting experience in the first chapter already. The foreword where the characters meet can make you believe that this is a contemporary romance. And then in the first chapter we already see Ravi and his team fighting monsters. It certainly gave me a whiplash, but that was totally my own fault and moreover, I love SFF storylines. Fighting monsters? Great, sign me up, no matter how unexpected that was at first.
And then Cayenne makes their way in the storyline. Just a note that Cayenne is non-binary so the pronoun “they” are used exclusively for this character, so that’s the reason I am not tagging this story as m/m romance. This is not a warning, I don’t believe one has to be warned about non-binary characters, this is just an explanation.
Cayenne is also, at least at first, one of the most annoying romantic leads I have ever “met” in fiction. First of all they are very high maintenance and once again, I don’t want to spoiler much, but I have to note that even though they certainly don’t do anything remotely non consensual, I kinda felt that they were almost attacking Ravi from the moment they appeared on the page. Let me stress, nothing remotely not consensual happened ever, it is more like Cayenne was too persistent in courting Ravi for my taste, too fast I guess?
But I have to go into some spoilers here because this was the main reason why I found Cayenne to be so incredibly annoying at first.
Also Cayenne obviously knows something about the events in the near or not so near future which connect them and Ravi and I am guessing that this is partially they reason why they appeared in the past to correct some wrongs as well and they are not answering any questions from Ravi, but demand to know everything about Ravi’s past, his work, etc. I get that whatever mystery will happen they are not answering for plot reasons, I am fine with that, but not answering anything about their family while demanding to know about Ravi’s?
Yes, I disliked them a lot, but then interesting things happened and I realized that the author actually seems to have a rather tight hold on the storyline and hopefully a lot more things will become clearer in the next book/ books. Also Cayenne has a character arc, which sadly I don’t see a lot in many m/m books, meaning that they are not just changing in the relationship, they try to make a certain change in their behavior, they seem to learn and maybe that change will even stick.
Ravi is just a noble monsters fighter for now, but they have great chemistry already and we do see that he has some interesting potential as well, and the ending of the book both annoyed me and made me kind of excited for the next one.
Grade: B
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Sirius
Sirius started reading books when she was four and reading and discussing books is still her favorite hobby. One of her very favorite gay romances is Tamara Allen’s Whistling in the Dark. In fact, she loves every book written by Tamara Allen. Amongst her other favorite romance writers are Ginn Hale, Nicole Kimberling, Josephine Myles, Taylor V. Donovan and many others. Sirius’ other favorite genres are scifi, mystery and Russian classics. Sirius also loves travelling, watching movies and long slow walks.
