Rating: 4.5🌈
K Sterling’s series The Bisbee Bachelors’ Club is a wonderful strange world to tumble into. For starters, it exists. Bisbee, Arizona is a real place. That knowledge alone sent me running to google as much as I could about a place that is as descriptively beautiful, narratively haunting, and just outright fascinating as you might imagine. The photographs made me want to take the next plane out to see it for myself.
With that rich, historic haunted town as both a backdrop and foundation, Sterling populates it with some great characters, of equal degrees of emotional depth and haunted backstories. The Bisbee Batchelor s Club. Stories written about the single men of the queer friendly, hippy artsy former copper mining town.
And it starts with one of the most emotionally haunted man of them all,
Cace Talbot. Surrounded by his son and close friends, it’s still not enough to keep the pain away from losing his soul mate, the man who left him and the town to pursue his art. Cace is still struggling and Sterling make him easy to understand and relate to.
Especially when the man he’s been trying to forget returns to town. That’s Laurence “Lorrie” Nixon, who’s come back after 25 years away.
There’s a realistic look at the years these men have lost. It’s a true bittersweet element that runs through their reunion and reconnecting relationship. Discussions over what might have been, the children they should have had, the moments lost they will never get, it’s so sad in those moments when they are sharing memories , painful, and heartbreaking. It’s twenty-five years of love and loss and longing that they know could have been theirs but wasn’t. This aspect is there even as they decide to go forward because it’s ingrained into who they’ve become.
I love that Sterling is able to build this not only into the storyline but into their characters too. It makes the depth of their bond even more believable.
The murder mystery that runs along side the romance rebuilding is good but strangely just a secondary storyline. It never feels like a main theme. I liked how it plays out, but wanted a little bit more details and depth to the investigation until the reveal. It was all a bit pat for me.
But the relationship between Lorrie and Cace? That was emotional and heartfelt. And adding in all the found family members around them was perfect.
I’m onto the next. I’m absolutely sold on the town and these characters. And I’m a fan of the author, so I’m thrilled to gave a new series to binge.
I’m happily recommending Haunted Hearts (The Bisbee Bachelors’ Club Book 1) by K Sterling. Enjoy!
The Bisbee Bachelors’ Club:
✓ Haunted Hearts #1
◦ Moonlight & Madness #2
◦ Unhappy Medium #3
◦ Grave Expectations #4
◦ Riddles & Rivals #5
◦ Shadows & Reservations #6
◦ Heart & Soulless #7
◦ Specters & Sparks #8
Buy Link
Haunted Hearts (The Bisbee Bachelors’ Club Book 1)
Blurb:
There are worse things haunting Cace Talbot than the ghosts inhabiting his beloved hometown. Hidden in Arizona’s Mule Mountains, Bisbee was small in a cozy way and just casually haunted with specters from its wild and sometimes dark past. Then, Laurence “Lorrie” Nixon returns after breaking Cace’s heart twenty-five years earlier and the town becomes too small and the memories a lot scarier.
Lorrie’s waited long enough and is determined to win Cace back no matter how hard he has to grovel. He’s already got his work cut out for him when a pair of copycat killings with echoes from Bisbee’s past cast suspicion Lorrie’s way. Lorrie turns to Cace and their band of childhood friends for help solving the brutal murders.
Cace doesn’t want to see his first love accused of a gruesome crime he didn’t commit but that doesn’t mean he’s letting Lorrie Nixon back into his life. At least, that’s what Cace says. His body on the other hand… Can Cace help find a killer without getting caught up in the memories and the pull of Lorrie’s lips?
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 