Mexican Heat by Laura Baumbach and Josh Lanyon

[lightreads]

Mexican Heat by Laura Baumbach

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


We interrupt this flow of childhood nostalgia rereads to bring you some gay porn -- excuse me, "manlove."

This is the one about the two undercover LEO's in a mob war and one of them calls the other -- I swear to God, I am not kidding about this -- gatito and there's lots of sexual dominance and tragedy and eventually some really dubious disability content. There is an exponentially higher component of batshittery than I usually expect out of Josh Lanyon, but you know, for that long stretch from 2 to 5 a.m. when there's just absolutely no way I'm getting to sleep, I was really down with that. In the light of day . . . yikes.


The thing with the limes and the net bags? That wasn't sexy, not even at 4:30 in the morning.




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Comments

[lightreads]

Would love recs. I just tried Heidi Cullanin and had this extremely weird experience where I could tell the book was actually pretty good and interesting, but wow, it was not for me.

[cyphomandra]

This got longer than I intended! (obviously I am putting off packing). Two general author recs first, and then some more specific books.

Jordan Castillo Price is responsible for the PsyCop series, currently at 6 novels and a handful of short stories. The first one’s more of a novella, but they get longer, and flesh out the world – in which psychic powers exist, as you may have guessed by the title – with a great supporting cast, excellent plotting and a lot of humour. Victor Bayne, the lead, is an endearingly awkward medium who has spent much of his life running from any deeper contemplation of his abilities, mainly via a vast variety of licit and illicit pharmaceuticals (the first romantic hero I’ve encountered who’s sniffed glue, though, rather than go for all that glamorous intravenous stuff); his boyfriend, with whom he hooks up with at a retirement party for his former police partner (who is black, happily married, fond of fishing and has not died yet, much to my surprise) is a vice cop with a kink for psychics and a partner who can tell when someone’s lying.

The sex is actually not the best point of these stories (it’s a bit too anatomical for my tastes) but the books are great. She has an earlier series about vampires that I have read bits of, vampires being very much not my thing, and some one-off books such as Zero Hour (a futuristic utopia in which everyone dies at 30 except for hot gay rebels who run coffee shops), and I’ve just actually ordered her latest in hard copy.

Ginn Hale is the other author I’d rec, although she’s more fantasy rather than m/m romance. Lord of the White Hell (2 volumes, complete) is an excellent secondary world fantasy with a nonwhite well-adjusted gay male lead with a supportive loving family (who also don't die!). Fortunately he is attending an engineering academy in another country full of dysfunctional fundamentalists, so there isn't really a lack of tension. She also has a short in Irregulars, the novella collection I mentioned, and which I’d also rec.

Then there are two very good contemporary m/m romances, both by authors who’ve done other books. Marie Sexton’s Strawberries for Dessert hits my “couple start off with casual sex no-strings arrangement that evolves into something more” trope fondness head-on. It’s part of a series involving the same group of people and technically the 5th book, but I started with it, and although I’ve read the others none of them are as good (not bad, though).

K.A. Mitchell’s No Souvenirs has an uptight arrogant Korean American trauma surgeon hooking up with laid back surfer type on dive cruise. One of them then follows the other back home. Again, this hits my character kinks head-on. I keep wistfully buying more KA Mitchell books, but they’ve all failed to get anywhere near the same emotional pitch.

Then there are a bunch of authors who are a bit more variable. I’d put Heidi Cullinan in here – which one did you read? Special Delivery is probably my favourite, but she does have an odd knack of combining very explicit sex with unbelievably sappy endings. Amy Lane is even worse for sap – the Promises series was like wading through treacle – but I liked Clear Water. Jane Somerville’s Zero at the Bone goes on for far too long but has one of those “only in fiction” hitmen who only kills bad people but is blackmailed into taking on a job involving an innocent, with whom he promptly then goes on the run with. Suprisingly, this started off as Brokeback Mountain slash. Lisa Henry’s The Island has an ethically dubious guy trying to save a DEA agent currently imprisoned on a tropical island as a druglord’s sextoy while pretending to be using him himself.

Um. This is probably telling you more about me than the books! Just one more – Sean Kennedy’s Tigers and Devils is director of independent film festival falls in love with closeted sports star, and is very Australian (in an good way!).

[cyphomandra]

Arrgh. I forgot to ask what format you read in. All of the above except Ginn Hale have been ebooks; the Ginn Hales I read in hardcopy. If you want any of the ebooks and are up for loans, I'm happy to email you copies. (I may have got this completely wrong, but do you read via a screen reader? I presume that works better with ebooks than hardcopy but am totally guessing)

[lightreads]

Yep, I'm all about the ebooks. The less proprietary the format the better, but it's not like you can't convert pretty much anything to rtf or html these days. I might hit you up for some of these, though a friend of mine has just been circulating an enormous lending library, and I suspect most things you listed are in there somewhere. (And in fact, if there's anything in particular you want to find, just ask me, because there's a decent bet I have it).

Thanks for the recs. I want to try Cullanin again -- I just went off about Nowhere Ranch in a review, which is not even so much about the book itself. It just hit me at the wrong time. I've also tried some of Price's Psycop stuff, though you're right about the first one being insubstantial and the sex not the greatest. That's what made me drop the series in the beginning, though you're not the first to tell me I should go back. I am a sucker for extended, well-developed background casts, so there's that.

I also just tried Amy Lane. Making Promises hit a lot of my buttons, but yep, quite unreasonably oversweet in places.

I'm reading Cut and Run and sequels on several different recs, and mostly enjoying them, as long as I unplug from all my knowledge of actual american federal law enforcement, because ahahahaha....no.