reviews_and_ramblings | Unjustly Accused by Shayne Carmichael

Kenny is a were fox in an Old Far West town at the end of the nineteen century. He works as a clerk in a bank and the owner of the bank is a thief. He has simulated several fake robberies to steal the money of the town people and when he realizes that he could be discovered, he frames Kenny.

Now Kenny is on the run and the only place he feels safe is a cave complex near his hometown. He knows well the place since he was used to play there with Nigel, his childhood best friend. The same Nigel he later realized was his first love, only that Kenny moved to another town when he was too young to consciously be in love.

Nigel is now the town sheriff and when he is asking to hunt his old best friend Kenny, he is in trouble. He can't believe that Kenny is guilty, since he remembers the man as one with a spotless reputation and he deeply honesty core. And then, he has also personal reason to not want Kenny being a thief, since he has always had special feelings for the guy.

The story is really short, 50 pages, and it has a lot of elements on the fire: the historical setting, the issue of the same sex relationship in a unwelcoming society, and the shifter nature of Kenny. All these elements are dealt in a good way: there are enough historical details to build the setting but not so much to make you cringe on the inconsistency.

The homosexual relationship is not lived in the open, and once a time, not all the people around them cheer to their love; even Mariah, Nigel's sister, for how much she loves her brother and likes Kenny, can't be totally accepting of their love; she can try to understand, but she is not immediately open to the possibility.

Last the shifter nature: Shayne Carmichael chose to build a setting in which the paranormal nature of Kenny is only a possible physical characteristic; shifters are a breed as white men or Native Americans, they have their tribes but live among humans in a peacefully cohabitation. Free of the boundaries of the paranormal, the author prefers to give relevance for the reader to another aspect of a relationship between a human and a shifter: the shifter is half-beast, and as an animal, he needs his time in "natural" form. And when Kenny is in fox form, he behaves as a fox: the scenes in which Kenny wanders around as a fox, could be a little hard to digest, since he is almost a puppy, and Nigel treats him like a lap dog... but probably it's the only way in which you can deal with this type of relationship: no hint of sex, on the contrary, give to Kenny an almost asexual behavior to be as far as possible to temptation.

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