Of Fire and Bone Of Magic and Scales Book #3
Gay Romance, LGBTQ, Paranormal
Hot Tree Publishing
June 19, 2021
Mobi
239
Amazon
Review by Ulysses Dietz
Member of The Paranormal Guild Review Team
Since I was dropped into the third book of this series, I got to experience how well Natalina Reis brings her readers along into the ongoing narrative. The central figures are Aiden Mercer and his boyfriend, Naël Fouchard. Fouchard must have been a major player in the earlier books, for not only is he a merman, but he has coaxed the thirty-seven-year-old Aiden out of what was apparently a slutty life and into blissful monogamy.
The crux of the three-part story is Aiden’s parentage, about which we learn a good deal, as Aiden grieves over his lousy childhood and absentee mother and father. But he has bigger fish to fry in part 3, since a longtime nemesis, a minor but violent Indian god named Baburaja, is back on the scene with ill intent.
This matters because Aiden has achieved something like a normal life, living in the Portuguese seaside resort town of Cascais, and managing his own local coffee shop. All he wants is to be left alone to love Naël and his adolescent sister Vee, as well as his motley crew of friends, witch and “regular.” Having a murderous Hindu deity after you (did we ever find out why?) tends to disrupt daily life, and it is keeping those he holds dear safe that finally forces Aiden to confront his anger and self-pity.
All in all, a kind of fun fantasy, even if I felt like I didn’t know everybody quite well enough—not the author’s fault! I did find Aiden more of a jerk than I’d have liked, but since he admits to being a jerk, I had to kind of forgive him.
Reis and her readers are, like many in the m/m world, enamored of descriptive scenes of sexual intimacy, and as always I have to confess that I rarely care much about that. I love that Aiden has found happiness with a big muscular merman, but I’m more inclined to leave their love-life behind closed doors.
I guess I ought to pick up the first two books in the series, because I suspect I missed a lot of fun.