Rating: 2 stars out of 6

After his partner’s death, Thomas Doyle lives a life made of work and late-night sexual encounters with unnamed bodies. It’s a life of solitude that leaves him too much time to think and regret.

Yet, despite everything, he jealously treasures it.

That’s why when Elias Byrne—who comes out of the shadows of Thomas’ nights—suddenly bursts into his everyday life with arrogance, Thomas finds himself fighting against ambivalent feelings—the need to reject the tormented Elias and the strange, inconceivable, and difficult to accept desire to join their solitudes.

In the beginning of this book I had high hopes – it was moving quickly and it was intriguing, I wanted to know Elias’s backstory, I wanted to know Thomas’s backstory.  By midway through the book I got a bit bored of the characters, I felt like they didn’t progress enough for me, Elias showed his age (I felt he could have been written a bit more adult given his past/current) and I found him rather annoying.

The same goes for Thomas, I felt he could have been written a bit more mature, he’s older and has a past (which in the end I wasn’t even really interested in) but he acted like a teenager sometimes.

It was all written mostly with Thomas/Elias – barely any outside influence happened at all and I was frustrated, it gave less opportunity for the characters to really develop.

Overall it just wasn’t my type of read – but it’s still worth a read if you like an intriguing backstory to a character/very main character driven book.

Kindle Edition, 123 pages
Published January 5th 2019 by JMS Books, LLC (first published May 28th 2016)
ASINB07MGNFX8L
Edition LanguageEnglish
SeriesLandmeadow #1