Elin Gregory

Happy Saturday!! If you click on the picture to the left it will take you to the SSnS blog hop page where you can read snippets from LGBTQ fiction authors. Since I am a rebel – bwahahahaha – I recommend other people’s work instead.

I’ve tried to read a bit less this week, because I’d got to the stage where seeing was getting to be an issue, but what I have read has been OH SO GOOD.

Mahu by Neil Plakcy has been on my TBR list for ages but this week I just happened to have casually dropped into MLR Press and there it was so … What a read! What a wild ride!

Kimo is a cop working in Waikiki in Hawaii, a place with which I am utterly unfamiliar. He’s in the closet, gay cops have a horrible time of it, but He’s peeping through a crack in the door. Circumstances conspire to throw the door open when he witnesses the aftermath to a murder outside a gay bar. The rest of the story is part a very well done and exciting murder mystery and part Kimo, his friends, family and colleagues coming to terms with his newly acknowledged status and the fall out that affects everyone around him.

It is all handled so well. The descriptions of the streets through which Kimo moves are intense and detailed making it easy to visualise each scene. Plakcy doesn’t pull any punches about the bigotry Kimo faces, but it’s not overdone either and I liked that there was development in the attitudes of some of the people around him, very believable. Kimo’s first attempts at finding partners were very nicely written too, dating, fast hookups but no detailed raunchy scenes.

Reading back over what I’ve written, I’m not doing a very good job of expressing just how much I enjoyed this book. So lets just say that it was great and that, as soon as I get paid, I plan to get the next in the series. OMG so many good books, so little time!