The Boy with the Painful Tattoo by Josh Lanyon

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The Boy With The Painful Tattoo: Holmes & Moriarity 3

4/5. M/M, third in the mystery series featuring two writers.

I started this last night when I took the dog out for her evening constitutional, and then it kept me company through the 4 a.m. insomnia. I didn't read this for the mystery (fine, but not engaging) or the genre jokes (many and charmingly bad). I sorta read it for the relationship, which is delightful and unusual in that these are two grownups who often fight with each other about things that grownups fight about! Imagine that.

Really, I read it for the protagonist. He's forty with a bad back and a vicious streak and a career on the rocks and a commitment to misanthropy that delights me. He's got piles of baggage and he doesn't fight fair, and he's the sort of guy who will say, "You're only hearing this once," over some romantic expression. He is just so cranky and vivid, and he doesn’t like kids, and he snarks on absolutely everything. He is aging ungracefully and he's a lot of work to love, but he's still allowed to be sexy. And falling in love has nothing to do with learning to smile or love the kid: it just involves wrangling boundaries at every turn. And I dig it.

Ugh, I really needed good satisfying M/M with actual human beings in it. Josh Lanyon is here for me.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison

The Goblin Emperor

4/5. Refreshingly anti-grimdark tale of the abused and neglected eighteen-year-old half-Goblin child of the Elf emperor elevated unexpectedly to the throne after his father and brothers are killed.

I have a huuuuuge loyalty kink (you guys didn't know that, didya? Didya? …You totally did). This one doubles down by combining loyalty with fealty, and hitting that sweet sweet spot of someone earning all of it.

This is a surprisingly gentle book about a boy determined to do better than he was done by; in which most people can be counted on to have redeeming qualities underneath; where providence is kind as much as cruel. I think one of the things I like best is that this is a book very much focused on forgiveness, but it doesn't short shrift anger. That is rare – stories of forgiveness like to treat anger as a brief, passing phase, something that the "good person" must put aside as quickly as possible. And I mean, I'm sure it's a total coincidence that 'turn the other cheek' is precisely the standard you hold people to if you want to ensure that abusers can always keep abusing, yep yep. This book believes in anger, and knows it lingers, and that anger and forgiveness aren't mutually exclusive, because it just isn't that simple.

A kind book, but not as simple as it pretends.

Things worth knowing: Katherine Addison is the pseud of Sarah Monette (not in any way a secret – I generally try not to publicly connect names authors don't want connected, but she clearly doesn't care). Also, there is apparently an invaluable naming conventions guide (in the back?) of the print edition which is not included with the audiobook. Why, Tantor Media, why? It actively pisses me off when production companies slice off so much metadata and front and back matter for audio, and in this instance I think it does the book very particular harm.