Love's Bequest: A Paranormal Romantic Suspense Big Bend Series Book 3
LGBT Romance
Independently Published
August 1, 2021
Steve sees ghosts, Eric feels lost. Will their love be enough to save them?
Eric couldn’t be happier that his friends have found love, but he feels left out. Distracting himself with a hike in nearby Big Bend National Park, Eric meets Steve, a well-known anthropologist.
The chemistry between the two is electric as they begin an intense affair. Little does Eric know; Steve is harboring a dark secret. Steve is clairvoyant and the spirits are telling him Eric’s life is in danger.
This ‘hurt to comfort’ story shows how the pair must work together to unravel the mystery surrounding the ghosts of the three brothers who appear with ominous warnings of an evil closing in.
Can Eric and Steve overcome their own past and trust each other enough to save themselves and the people they love?
Reviewed by Ulysses Dietz
Member of The Paranormal Romance Guild Review Team
This, the final installment of the “Big Bend” series, is more full of paranormal plot threads than the other two books combined—and it is clearly the author’s culmination of what amounts to a Flex-Eddie-Eric trilogy. In this book it is Eric’s turn to find his dream; Eric Anderson, the best friend from Flex’s childhood who appears in the first book, and then appears more briefly in the second.
This time, what captures our imagination is not simply the vast open spaces of the mountainous family ranch along the Rio Grande near Big Bend, but the mystery-shrouded family histories that Eric, and his unexpected soulmate, Steven Fowler, dig into. I confess that the resonance I felt with the slightly complicated storyline of this book is due to a similar use of family history in my own latest novel (Cliffhanger, reviewed on PRG earlier this year). Family history is too easily forgotten within a single generation, and in this book the three couples of the trilogy take center stage as their lives conjoin in unforeseen ways.
We really don’t know Eric much before this book—certainly not the unhappiness that he, like Flex and Eddie, has incurred from his birth family. Eric’s backstory becomes a driver for both his relationship with Steven and the new light in which his old friends Flex and Eddie see him. Steven, for his part, lives a life of self-imposed isolation, keeping his “second sight” carefully hidden from the outside world, lest his credibility as an archaeologist be damaged—or worse. He, of course, has no idea of the ghostly characters who have already changed the lives of Eric and his friends
In this third volume, Blake Allwood’s voice takes on a self-assuredness that really works. His matter-of-fact writing is seasoned with the individual accents of his characters, bringing a subtle realism to the narrative that feels authentic—real people living real stories, rather than an author telling tales.
Part of the success of this series, and this final part of it in particular, is the author’s understanding that, even as a novelist, he is being a kind of historian. Even fictional history has to make sense (even paranormal history!) in the context of its time and place. This is by no means a period romance, but Allwood catches us up in the long past of the Big Bend ranch, and thus makes his imaginary narrative feel true.