Survival Instinct by Roxy Harte was a hard novel to get to grips with. There was plenty of great action to start and I loved the whole *stuck in a storm lets share our warmth* storyline at the start. But, after that the novel failed to fire for me. How the death of Brian’s brother and lover were dealt with was just too fast to be believable and the characterization of Tobias was not always appealing. While the style of writing was easy to read and reasonably entertaining, this was not an easy one to get through. ( )

The story is a mix of funny and thriller, and it has the merit to have sidetracked me. When we met Brian, he is a recent widower of Michael, the man he was divorcing from after he found out he was cheating him with his twin brother Brandon; Brandon and Michael accidentally died together in a car crash before they were able to have a proper closure with Brian. Now Brian is in the middle of two different hurt: he is missing his brother and husband but at the same time he is angry with them. In a burst of energy, he decides to drive until a place he does not yet know where and instead gets stranded in the middle of a mountain during a snowstorm risking hypothermia.

When hunky ranger Hawk rescues him, there is no doubt Brian is gay: if the sticker on his car were not clues enough, the black thong with a pink bow in the centre of a pretty bum is probably the killer clue. So when Hawk has to go pretty intimate with Brian to give him all the body warm he can gather (included that of his own dog Shadow), the fact that also Hawk is gay seems a bonus and not a problem.

Hawk is living in a very small mountain town, where basically there is a townhouse, a diner, a hotel and nothing more else. When the townsfolk happen to know a stranger is in town, and said stranger has slept with their resident park ranger, counting 2 plus 2 is pretty easy; despite Hawk worries to maintain his closet a secret, people around seem to have not problem with him being gay, probably they are more interested in the chance of having a new resident: if Hawk is good enough to draw another man in town, the fact that this man will sleep in Hawk’s bed is not apparently a problem.

But Brian arrived in town running away from something, and the strange accident causing the death of both his husband and twin brother was too much a coincidence for me to think it was causal. While reading about Brian and Hawk’s developing relationship, I was also searching for some clue that linked Brian to some strange event; and instead I was completely out of track, and Brian was not the man in danger of the situation. On the contrary, pretty Brian with his rainbow stickers and black thong with a pink bow will have the chance to play the role of the hero, a role that Hawk, with his Native American origins perfectly matching Brian’s fetish with the Last of Mohicans, was expecting to fill.

As I said, there is a roller coast between danger and funny moments, all characters involved have their sudden turns, even the dog and Hawk’s grandfather, the old tribe shaman… no one is behaving like you would expect, and in the end, this gives the story a light feeling, the reader is always expecting for the unexpected.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003QHZLGW/?tag=elimyrevandra-20