Hanging The Stars (Half Moon Bay #2) by Rhys Ford
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Half Moon Bay #2
Pages: 206
Published by Dreamspinner Press on December 5th 2016
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo
Goodreads

Angel Daniels grew up hard, one step ahead of the law and always looking over his shoulder. A grifter’s son, he’d learned every con and trick in the book but ached for a normal life. Once out on his own, Angel returns to Half Moon Bay where he once found…and then lost…love.
Now, Angel’s life is a frantic mess of schedules and chaos. Between running his bakery and raising his troubled eleven-year-old half-brother, Roman, Angel has a hectic but happy life. Then West Harris returns to Half Moon Bay and threatens to break Angel all over again by taking away the only home he and Rome ever had.
When they were young, Angel taught West how to love and laugh but when Angel moved on, West locked his heart up and threw away the key. Older and hardened, West returns to Half Moon and finds himself face-to-face with the man he’d lost. Now, West is torn between killing Angel or holding him tight.
But rekindling their passionate relationship is jeopardized as someone wants one or both of them dead, and as the terrifying danger mounts, neither man knows if the menace will bring them together or forever tear them apart.

My Review:

If it wasn’t for bad luck, the Harris family in Half Moon Bay wouldn’t have any luck at all. Or so it seems. In the first book in the series, Fish Stick Fridays, Lang Harris is being stalked by a deranged ex-lover. While Lang does get his happy ever after, it only comes though a LOT of pain.

In Hanging the Stars, the story switches from Lang to his twin brother West. And someone is trying their damndest to kill West. So far, they keep missing, but not by much. They get close enough often enough that West retreats to his remote retreat, a house outside of Half Moon Bay.

It’s where Lang, along with his husband Deke and their niece Zig (the stars of Fish Stick Fridays) can look in on West frequently, and where West has the opportunity to spoil Zig at every turn. West’s and Lang’s relationship has always been a bit fraught, thanks to the way that their icy-cold father pitted them against each other at every turn. But West’s relationship with chaos-agent Zig is a thing of beauty. And joy. Both brothers seem to be lavishing the little girl with all the affection neither of them got as children.

But there’s something else waiting for West Harris in Half Moon Bay, and it’s something that he has been avoiding for years. His past. And that past is all wrapped up in the person of Angel Daniels, the only man that West has ever loved. Even though they left each other behind, in pain and tragedy, back when they were teenagers, no one and nothing has ever gotten that close to West since.

Angel hasn’t moved on either, at least not in that sense. But Angel now has other demands on his time and his heart. He’s become the default guardian for his kid brother Roman, a pre-teen boy dealing not just with the vicious onset of puberty, but also coping somewhere on either the ADHD or autism spectrum, or possibly both.

And someone recovering, just as Angel still is, from their physically and emotionally abusive father.

Angel is also coping with managing the Moonlight Hotel in Half Moon Bay, a decrepit fleabag of a place that he has somehow managed to cobble into a last chance home for all of the town’s misfits. He became the manager of the old hotel, and the owner of the adjacent bakery, in a deal with West and Lang’s grandmother.

It’s all that Angel has, and all that keeps Child Protective Services from sweeping Roman into foster care. And West’s company has been trying to take it away from him, in order to build expensive condos on beautiful Half Moon Bay.

When the threats against West’s life escalate, he’s forced to come back to Half Moon Bay, to confront his past, his company’s rather rapacious present, and all his unresolved feelings for Angel.

While somebody takes potshots at both of them from the shadows.

Escape Rating A-: The mystery here is quite a puzzle. Someone is after West. Someone is also after Angel. And that same someone, whoever it is, keeps trying to pin those crimes on the two would-be victims. In other words, someone is doing a damn good job of making it look like Angel is behind the attacks on West, and vice versa. That nefarious someone doesn’t succeed, but they do make a damn good try of it.

In addition to living through seemingly random attempts at murder, arson and kidnapping, some of which are more successful than others, West is also forced to deal with the discovery that one of his best friends and business partners has been robbing him blind. But that “friend” can’t be the person behind all the mayhem, because the dangers keep escalating after the bastard gets himself killed.

The hits just keep on coming. But in the middle of all the fires, and gunshots, and everything else that keeps going wrong, West and Angel manage to grope their way back to each other. Sometimes through broken glass.

And they start making a home for Roman. It looks like West is planning to spoil Roman every bit as much as he does Zig. Watching the family dynamic start to come together is awesome.

But there is a whodunnit behind it all. I’ll admit that I figured out who must be doing it, or at least part of it, fairly early on. Angel was so worried, and rightly so, about one basty-assed-nastard coming back into their lives that it was bound to happen. I’ll also admit that the motives behind the mess were not completely what I expected.

As much as I loved this book, and as much as I enjoy this series so far, I’m wondering where things go from here. In the author’s Cole McGinnis series, because Cole was a private investigator, it made sense that he kept dodging baddies and bullets, But the level of violence that Lang and West both had to face doesn’t seem organic to what would otherwise be a marvelous small-town romance series. So, even though both characters needed to work through a lot of pain to figure out what they really wanted out of life, I hope that in future installments either the danger ratchets down, or it attaches itself to someone who faces those dangers for a living. No family has this much bad luck.

Or at least I sure hope not. My last name is Harris too!

Fish Stick Fridays by Rhys Ford
Formats available: paperback, ebook
Series: Half Moon Bay #1
Pages: 204
Published by Dreamspinner Press on November 30th 2015
Purchasing Info: Author's Website, Publisher's Website, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Bookshop.org
Goodreads

Deacon Reid was born bad to the bone with no intention of changing. A lifetime of law-bending and living on the edge suits him just fine until his baby sister dies and he finds himself raising her little girl.
Staring down a family history of bad decisions and reaped consequences, Deacon cashes in everything he owns, purchases an auto shop in Half Moon Bay, and takes his niece, Zig, far away from the drug dens and murderous streets they grew up on. Zig deserves a better life than what he had, and Deacon is determined to give it to her.
Lang Harris is stunned when Zig, a little girl in combat boots and a purple tutu, blows into his bookstore, and then he s left speechless when her uncle, Deacon Reid, walks in hot on her heels. Lang always played it safe, but Deacon tempts him to step over the line just a little bit.
More than a little bit. And Lang is willing to be tempted.
Unfortunately, Zig isn t the only bit of chaos dropped into Half Moon Bay. Violence and death strike, leaving Deacon scrambling to fight off a killer before he loses not only Zig but Lang too. "

My Review:

I’m guaranteed to fall in love with any story where the cats are named Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser. (If you like sword and sorcery and want to visit its most awesome progenitor, get thee to a bookstore and pick up Fritz Leiber’s fantastic stories of this ill assorted pair, starting with the parent of all sword and sorcery, Ill Met in Lankhmar, included in Swords and Deviltry)

Moving away from my squeeing digression, let’s go back to Fish Stick Fridays. Zig owns this story, and both of the men in it, even though it probably wasn’t intended as her book. Zig is eight, and an absolute magnet for chaos, with her marvelous bad attitude, a chip on her shoulder a mile wide, and her pink and purple tutus.

With Zig follows her uncle Deacon Reid. Deacon has come to Half Moon Bay on the Oregon coast with his niece Zig, his skills as a mechanic and motorcycle restorer, and a hope or a prayer that he and Zig can start a life together far away from the mean streets where Deacon spent time in jail and where his sister, Zig’s often addicted mother, finally took a one-way ticket out of the life she had destroyed for herself, leaving Zig in the foster care system until a judge was willing to take a chance on her ex-con brother.

Deacon bought the auto repair shop in Half Moon Bay sight unseen, praying for a fresh start helping people repair their understeer or oversteer problems on their trucks. The shop turns out to have been a good investment, but trouble follows them.

Deacon, who may look like the baddest of bad boys but is an absolute marshmallow on the inside, at least when it comes to Zig, is the picture of temptation to bookstore owner Lang Harris. Lang not only owns his own bookstore, he also owns a big chunk of real estate around town, and the two cats who seem to have stolen Zig’s heart – or vice versa. Once Zig met the cats, Lang was probably doomed.

As Deacon practically turns himself inside out being a terrific parent to Zig, Lang Harris finds himself tempted by this man who has blown into his life with the force of a hurricane – or the hurricane force powered by the dynamo little girl.

It’s 2015 or thereabouts, and that Deacon and Lang are gay doesn’t seem to be a big deal to anyone but the two of them. Attempting to create a relationship when neither of them has experience with much more than one-night stands is enough of a challenge, along with Deacon’s single-parent worrying about Zig becoming too attached to someone who might or might not become a permanent part of her life.

But the real fear is whether any of them have a chance at happy ever after – not because of the relationship, but because a series of near-fatal incidents has followed Deacon and Zig from their old haunts all the way to Half Moon Bay. There are too many possible suspects, from the bad guys that Deacon did occasional business with to the bad guys that Zig’s mother did occasional business with to the possessive psycho who carved Lang up before he got carted off to prison.

But someone is out to get either Deacon, Lang, Zig or the lot of them. Deacon finds himself forced to trust the local cops to keep them all safe, or at least to help them investigate the mess. Because one of these days, whoever is after them is going to get in a lucky shot. Unless Deacon gets there first.

Escape Rating A-: I’d say I want my own Fafhrd and The Gray Mouser, but my own feline brood would strongly object. However, the way that Zig takes over their purry little hearts, as well as running the life of the two men who fall into her whirlwind orbit is definitely part of the charm of this story.

Lang and Deacon never hide who they are. It’s 2015 and they just don’t have to any more. Lang has plenty of his own issues, but they have to do with his knifed up history and his screwed up family – no one in town cares. A psychopathically possessive ex is an unfortunate possibility for any of us, at least in fiction.

It’s the relationship between Deacon and Zig that gives this story its heart and soul. Deacon never expected to become a parent, but he feels a strong obligation to do better by Zig than he did by her mother, his much younger sister. He does feel as if he could have saved her if he’d been around, but it wasn’t meant to be. So he is devoting his life to keeping Zig out of the foster care system and giving her the loving home that he and his sister never had with their own alcoholic mother. Part of the sweetness in the story is all about Deacon making things up as he goes along, and always fearing that he is doing the wrong thing. He wants the best for Zig, and is doing his damnedest to give her the love she needs, as well as the roots and boundaries she’ll require to grow up strong and happy. The loving push-pull of their relationship is a joy to watch.

The romance between Lang and Deacon takes a bit of a back seat to Deacon’s relationship with Zig, and that seems right. At this stage in their lives, making sure that Zig has a solid grounding in her new life is more important to Deacon than anything else – which is what makes him such a good father for his niece.

The suspense ratchets up to boiling over tension as the story goes on. At first, Deacon is sure that whoever is after them is after him. Lang, with the psychotic ex in his past and the scars to remember him by, is equally certain that whoever is shooting at them and trying to burn them out is after him. The police have too many suspects at first to sort out who might be gunning for whom, and why. It’s only as Zig feels safe with Deacon and Lang that anyone is able to get a handle on their would-be killer.

Zig learning to trust, knowing that the adults in her life will believe in her and back her up, both solves the mystery and lets us see just how far they have all come down the road of becoming a family – tutus and all.