Genre: Contemporary
LGBTQ+ Category: Gay
Reviewer: Ulysses
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About The Book
Luke Sinclair has spent years rebuilding a life he nearly didn’t survive. A respected dermatologist, he keeps his world carefully controlled: part-time hours, familiar routines, and emotional guardrails strong enough to keep the past where it belongs. He knows exactly how fragile peace can be. What he doesn’t know is what to do with the sharp pull he feels toward men—especially men like Neil Sainsbury.
Neil Sainsbury owns the coolest bar in town: loud music, beautiful strangers, and absolutely no room for vulnerability. Charming, reckless, and notoriously hard to pin down, Neil has built his entire life on confidence and control. But behind the lights and flirtation, he’s harbouring a devastating secret, and if anyone finds out, he’s terrified he’ll lose everything he’s worked for.
When Neil trips off the stage during a live event and a doctor is called from the crowd, Luke accidentally discovers the truth Neil is desperate to hide.
What begins as reluctant support turns into late-night conversations, unexpected trust, and a friendship neither man saw coming. Luke understands too well what it means to live inside fear. Neil understands exactly how dangerous it is to let someone close enough to see the truth.
But falling in love means risking exposure, and both men have spent years hiding the parts of themselves they fear make them impossible to love.
Set against the glow of London nightlife, this is a contemporary MM romance about survival, vulnerability, and learning that being seen might be the bravest thing of all
The Review
Fearne Hill is such a gifted writer, taking classic romance and making it both deeper and more—what? educational? That doesn’t sound as flattering as I mean it to be. Hill looks deep into things that are the opposite of romantic, and therefore pretty much central to human life. This Mis-Shape series, so far, doing a great job.
The classic part of the set-up here is the Rock Star and the Smart Nerd; but it veers away from the classic basis pretty quickly. Neil Sainsbury is the lead singer in a metal band called Pretty Vacant. More importantly, really, is Earth, the London bar Neil and his best friend Ezra own and run together, and above which Neil lives.
Luke Sinclair is a doctor, a dermatologist. He’s a friend of a friend and tends to hang out on the periphery of Earth, watching Neil perform. After Neil falls off the stage—again—during a performance, Luke is called on to look him over to make sure he’s not concussed. Forced into proximity with his secret idol, Luke begins to question what’s behind Neil’s tumbles.
And there you have it. There are secrets, big secrets, that both young men, the rocker and the doctor, live with and don’t want to share with their friends for fear of being treated differently. Thing is, they are different, and going it alone is taking its toll.
I won’t divulge any more except to note that, as in all romance, high or low, men are stupid and do stupid things. In this book, however, it is something searingly powerful and close to the bone. The question is not what’s wrong, or will they find love; but whether Neil and Luke are the guys who will stick around when things get ugly.
Fearne Hill makes you love her characters, which is, I guess, the point. You’ll read because you care, no matter if it hurts.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
