Caught A Balance of Magic Book #1
Asian Myth, LGBTQ Fantay,
Independent
Sept 24, 2021
Kindle
271
Amazon
Save two worlds, or save each other?
Rakurai hunts demons. He doesn't consort with gods. Until he meets Tenzen.
Tenzen cares for souls. He despises the callous, self-absorbed Yuvine. Until he meets Rakurai.
A rescue and a sacrifice make a death god and a hunter fall in love, but a life of bliss is a long way off. Someone is disturbing the balance of magic and threatening two worlds. And while desire draws Rakurai and Tenzen together, duty, assassins, and clan politics keep them apart.
When they're forced to make a choice, who will Tenzen and Rakurai save? Two worlds or each other?
***
Caught starts a new mm paranormal romance series, A Balance of Magic, featuring mortals and immortals from both sides of the veil, old promises, new revelations, and a bloody fight between love and duty. It is the first book of a trilogy and ends with a HFN. The characters will get their HEA in the final boo
Review By Ulysses Dietz
Member of the Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
“Caught” launches a fascinating series by Jackie Keswick.The central premise is a world in which humans are protected by semi-mortals called Yuvine, who hunt the demons that plague humanity. There is another—Otherworld—inhabited by immortals. Tenzen is one of those—a death god, charged with gathering the souls of the recently dead and healing them—preparing them for moving on. Tenzen lives alone, quite contentedly, nurturing his garden and caring for the souls—even the souls of demons—that he has gathered.
The Yuvine hunters can move between the human world and the immortal Otherworld, and one of these, Yamakage Rakurai, stumbles across Tenzen, trapped in a demon’s snare, and sets him free. Thus begins an unheard-of relationship that both changes their lives and leads to the revelation of a profound evil that is poisoning the Yuvine clans and endangering both worlds.
Keswick takes this rather fantastical premise, established as being in Japan, but incorporating a global network of Yuvine hunter clans; and makes it compelling through the characters of Tenzen and Rakurai. For all their magical powers, these two men seem like mortal men in their compassion and evolving feelings for each other. The details of their lives, both shared and apart, are beautifully presented, creating a vivid setting in which the narrative unspools.
Keswick sets a very different mood for this story, even though it has plenty of the classic m/m tropes for the committed reader. It really caught me up in both plot and characters, and also set me up to buy the second book in the series (“Cursed”), which is already on my device.