reviews_and_ramblings | Through the Dark by Mychael Black & Shayne Carmichael

Setting at the end of the sixteen century, this is a pretty "classical" paranormal romance story with a bit of a kinky side.

Jeremy is a stranger in a small village in North Wales. He is here to free his cousin from the clutches of the Church which holds him imprisoned in a monastery. Along the path he meets Grey, a mourning man. Grey has just lost his lover, Rhys, the man with whom he chose to leave in an almost isolation in a estate atop a cliff. Now Grey is a very dangerous man with fits of uncontrollable rage that no one seems to be able to control, no one except Jeremy.

Jeremy is a noble, but also a werewolf, and this hidden ability allows him to see in Grey his mate, and to be able to soothe him and his rage. Grey needs Jeremy to control him, because without the man beside him, he is unbalanced.

Even if the story has an historical setting, there aren't many historical references. It's quite interesting how the story deals with the Church and the political matters, quite true the fact that Church think to have the right to persecute a man until it finds that he has "powerful" friends: if you are poor and without connections, you can be easily charge of witchcraft, but if you are an important man, witchcraft becomes only an oddity you are allowed to cultivate and homosexuality something that strangely no one notice.

The big appeal for me in this book is Jeremy's relationship with Grey, his ability to comprehend the man and to love him not for what he could be as a "healthy" man, but for what he is now, with all his supposed madness and his instability, but also with his great need of love. Grey could be a strong man in body, but he is like a child in a emotional level: he needs to grow and he needs that someone stronger, like Jeremy, takes him step by step during his journey, something that neither his family, or his former lover Rhys, understood.

A big warning to most sensible readers: this is a shapeshifter romance that push a bit the boundaries on the furry thing... there is a bit of sex in partial shifted form, means that one of the lovers is a man with... well, more fur than expected.

Reading the book I have the feeling that this is only a little part in a bigger series: there are a lot of references to other characters and situations, and hints of possible future stories. Romance, historical and paranormal are not elements easily found together in the M/M genre, and so, maybe it would be interesting to have more, and maybe, since it's also an historical romance, to have also more on the setting.

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Amazon Kindle: Through the Dark

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