This book started off fairly well, with a man, Owen, trying to come to terms with the death of his sister. This is a horror story, so the horror comes in as outright hallucinations, which honestly isn’t quite as creepy as something more subtle would have been. Some of the initial events seem like a bit of a stretch but make sense in the context of what he’s been going through.

Owen heads out to cottage country to stay in the same rental as his sister and to go diving in the same lake where she drowned, which is apparently a flooded reservoir over the old part of the town. There’s some revelations about his past, some of which seemed pretty obvious (i.e. who his father was) and a not exactly random but not entirely necessary sexual liaison that just seemed kind of weird, especially considering what happened later.

As we progress in the book it seemed like the bad guy or the evil or whatever you want to call it gained more and more power but that power seemed to be applied inconsistently, so it didn’t entirely work for me. I just couldn’t accept the giant hand made of water that showed up out of the blue. I’m not sure whether someone who reads more horror would have liked it better but it just didn’t quite strike the right notes for me.

This book did have a lot of potential, however. I mean, flooded town where people go diving to peruse the ruins is a good, creepy starting point. Overall I’d consider it okay but not great, and I wasn’t discouraged from eventually checking out Ralston’s collection of short stories, which I also have. I mean, it was fun to read a horror story in a middle of nowhere town where you had to drive an hour just to get to the hospital in Peterborough (for reference for non-Canadians, Google tells me Peterborough is 125 km NE of Toronto and 270 km SW of Ottawa, and has a little over 80k people, which is more than I guessed).

I hemmed and hawed about rating this book between 3.5 and 4 stars, but I went for 4 stars because it was a lot of fun.  I saw it described somewhere as a Firefly-esque story mixed in with some Fast and Furious and that works for me. We have a rag-tag group of characters hieing their way across the galaxy in search of a rather mythical warship that would be one helluva salvage score.  It's mostly space opera with a hefty side order of magic and while the magic was never really explained, I found it didn't matter much to me.

There are some fun characters here and I became fond of most, if not all of them.  I loved the banter between them all and even if one of the main characters, the youthful race car driver, Nilah, made me want to shake her at times, it was an amused shake. 

Only a couple of things bothered me, and they were probably small, but whenever I came across them in the book, it threw me right out of the story for a moment or two.  Firstly, the author decided that ships aren't "she" in this far future universe, they are "he". Don't know why, there's never an explanation or anything, but every time the ship was designated this way, it gave me pause.  The other thing was that the Captain called his crew Miss Thing, Missus Thing, Mister Thing (whatever their family names were) and it felt so out of place in this futuristic universe that I was pulled right out of the story.  I found it peculiar. 

Anyway, all in all, it was a super fun read and if you enjoy KB Wagers Idranan Trilogy or James Corey's Expanse series, you'll probably enjoy this one. I'm looking forward to the next book - it's on my list. 

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Original Source : https://goo.gl/NZgQko

Eli Gaither was a big, rough, mean sumabitch of a man. Solitary by choice, he only attended Gaither family events when he was made to. Still hurting from a painful divorce, he was like an angry bear licking his wounds. Most people, save for his family, avoided him until Oscar Hernandez came into his life, yelling at him and turning his world upside down.

 
Okay, maybe he was plain loco for hitting on the grizzly bear of a man in front of him but

he couldn’t help it. The man was so freaking hot. But Oscar was not about to let this man tell him what to do and how to think. If Eli Gaither thought him a shrinking violet, he had another thing coming. Oscar was used to getting his way, so Eli was in for the ride of his life with the hot blooded Latin man.

Review

Tatesville was a quiet little town just east of Atlanta, home to the Gaither clan. Emmett Gaither loved his family and his life. It was perfect. Being the only gay son had its challenges but his family stood by him and loved him all the same. He never dreamed that his world would be turned upside side by the new banker in town. The sexy blonde man made Emmett’s blood boil. But he wouldn't be interested in a redneck man like Emmett? Would he?

Alex King had lived a gypsy life. Leaving the northwest, he thought he wanted to live in the bustling city of Atlanta. Still he wasn’t happy, so he jumped on the change to move to a quieter life in Tatesville. He was sure he’d never meet a good guy in the little southerntown. Imagine his surprise when one of his customers wanted to fix him up with her SON! Had he move to the Twilight Zone? If so, he was happy to live there when the customer’s tall, dark and handsome walked into his bank…now what?

Review

This romance was going along swimmingly in a nice opposites attract way when it took a turn with really jerky friends. 

Why?

I like it much better as a character driven romance.