Rise of the Thing Down Below by Daniel W. Kelly
Thanks to Net Galley and Bold Strokes Books for the review copy.
In this third installment of the Comfort Cove series, private dick Deck Waxer is once again on the case. When men on the gay island paradise start washing up disembodied on the beach, it’s up to Deck and his friends to solve the mystery before the mysterious murder-spree is discovered by the populace.
Having never read a Comfort Cove book before, I felt like the author did a good job of catching new readers up to speed without overwhelming us with info that may or may not be relevant to book three. We also meet three new characters, and learn some interesting facts regarding what I presume is the larger plot stretching through all the Comfort Cove books.
This book reminded me a lot of the literary stylings of Zavo in terms of there being readily available sex between extremely well-built and joyfully horny men around every corner. They go much farther than Zavo in that the sex tends to be anything but the vanilla oral/anal combo we know so well from the Jake Slater books. Sex in the Comfort Cove universe is almost gamified, even outside of the context where it is literally a series of carnival games. I wouldn’t even call it hot so much as it’s mentally intriguing, and i don’t think I’d change a thing, because while I can think of a dozen books with more stimulating sex scenes, I can’t think of any with more interesting ones, and that’s the true beauty of Daniel Kelly.
If you ever wanted to know, for example what an entire carnival full of sex games would look like, or how a two foot tall man would fuck a giant, or even just what life would be like on an island entirely populated by confident, disease free gay men in their sexual primes, The Rise of the Thing Below is for you. Bonus murder mystery.
5 stars out of 5 for knowing what it is, and being that extremely well.