Rating: 3.6* of five

The Publisher Says:The faeries at the bottom of the garden are coming back—with an army.

Under the Hill, Part 1

When Ben Chaudhry is attacked in his own home by elves, they disappear as quickly as they came. He reaches for the phone book, but what kind of exterminator gets rid of the Fae? Maybe the Paranormal Defense Agency will ride to his rescue.

Sadly, they turn out to be another rare breed: a bunch of UFO hunters led by Chris Gatrell, who—while distractingly hot—was forcibly retired from the RAF on grounds of insanity.

Shot down in WWII—and shot forward seventy years in time, stranded far from his wartime sweetheart—Chris has been a victim of the elves himself. He fears they could destroy Ben’s life as thoroughly as they destroyed his. Chris is more than willing to protect Ben with his body. He never bargained for his heart getting involved.

Just when they think there’s a chance to build a life together, a ghostly voice from Chris’s past warns that the danger is greater than they can imagine. And it may take more than a team of rank amateurs to keep Ben—and the world—out of the elf queen’s snatching hands…

Product Warnings
Brace yourself for mystery, suspense, sexual tension, elves in space and a nail-biting cliffhanger ending.

My Review: Exactly and precisely as the book description says it is. Now, anyone who has ever interacted with me knows I'm no fan of fantasy, but there is nothing on earth more useless than a hermetically sealed mind so I tried this out. Fantasy plus men having sex with each other *must* be better than the straight kind.

Well, yeah, of course.

But there isn't any serious sex in here, so unwad your panties you breeders. One little scene, nothing even close to explicit. The point of this novel isn't the zeal of the organs for each other, it's the Hero's Journey. And the Hero has a wonderful journey, from WWII to 1995 in a blink, then living through the birth of our 21st-century world, and meeting someone whose own Hero's Journey is crossgrained to his own. Ben is Indian, living in Bakewell, and working in a bank; Chris is as English as spotted dick, living in Bakewell, and fighting the forces of supernatural invasion as he once fought the Luftwaffe. They aren't instantly obviously going to fit together. And that's the fun, romantic part of the story.

But then there's the fantasy bit, complete with German fairies invading and occupying English Elven territory; an ancient prophecy that demands an English bomber crew be brought to the other world; an air force of modern fighters in the elven lands, ready to rain destruction on...well, anyone; and a princess hostage damsel in distress to satisfy the conventions, one whose seductiveness can straighten the crooked path of a lost navigator.

I've read Beecroft's Hearts-of-Oaky smexy romances, and so I knew what to expect from the prose. It's direct, it's unfussy, and it's effective. (It also needs copyediting, but that's not Beecroft's fault, it's Samhain's...I mean, calling someone "died-in-the-wool"? It's DYED and that should have knocked the publisher's eye out!) I had sort-of hoped for the Age of Sail's smut content, since I like that kind of thing, but was steeled for the mildness of the entry by previous reviews.

The issues for me, apart from the copyediting, were focused around the hanging-together-ness of the plot's big points. Why, I wondered, does it not occur to modern-day Ben (20s) to ask why Chris (late 30s) is SO old-fashioned? It's right completely out of the modern day, the way Chris behaves towards Ben, even after Chris comes out to him. How has Chris managed to live almost 20 years in the modern era and not had more of it rub off on him? How on earth does he live, I mean money-wise? They're niggles. But they're niggles about big points.

But, and this is why I rated this book at least a full star above any other with issues that size, this is a thumping good read, with lots of very interesting urban-fantasy takes on old fantasy tropes, and characters whose happiness I actually care about. Yes, yes, teenaged girls are people too, but I don't care about their Special Uniqueness and Awesome Powers even a little bit. I do care about Ben's. And Chris's. And I want them to have a happily ever after.

Because they're man-lovin' men. For once someone is talking to ME. And I like it. Thanks, Mrs. Beecroft, for doing your usual solid job of entertaining me. ( )

When it's so common to find a great many books which are rather less than was expected, it's wonderful to run into something that is so very much more than was expected or even hoped for. I trolled the Samhain Publishing site a while back, and short-listed this book, and eventually bought it, and then promptly forgot everything about it. Every time I scrolled past it on the Kindle or saw the cover (I cordially dislike the cover), I thought "m/m romance – not in the mood" and kept going with a faint feeling of embarrassment for having bought it. There are times when I wish I could go back and apologize to my past self for doubting her judgment – because, boy, did I. This was fantastic.

I mean not just enthusiastically but literally – this wasn't simply a contemporary romance sort of thing. In fact, romance was only a very small part of the book, in the conventional sense. By which mean if you're seeking out gay romance novels for the sex scenes, keep seeking; apart from one scene it was a book about two people feeling each other out, not up. In the more traditional sense, the old-fashioned sense of romance in terms of (oh, this is good, Wikipedia): "love emphasizing emotion over libido" – yes. Quite. Also, the older-still meaning of romance applies very nicely to this book: "A long fictitious tale of heroes and extraordinary or mysterious events, usually set in a distant time or place". Yes. Quite.

The synopsis is a little hard to swallow. Bear with me. It's worth it.

The Goodreads description begins: "The faeries at the bottom of the garden are coming back—with an army." Which is brilliant, by the way. And not untrue. Ben Chaudhry, a young Londoner of Indian extraction, has a close encounter of the fey kind, he has no idea what to do. Tinkerbell has nothing to do with these fairies; these are old-fashioned tall-and-beautiful-and-deadly fey, and they scare the hell out of him. As they should. He's fairly sure he's losing his mind, but a giant just shook his house like a rattle – he has to do something. So he turns to the local equivalent of the Ghostbusters, a local branch of UFO/ghost/what-have-you-got hunters led by an (extremely attractive, of course) older (by which I mean my age) man named Chris Gatrell, ex-RAF.

What Ben doesn't know is just how ex-RAF he is.

Chris, you see, was a hotshot bomber pilot in the early days of WWII. (No, I'm not that old. Neither is he. Sort of.) He and his team went on a mission; something terrible happened, of which he was the only survivor. In the late 80's. He was discharged for mental health reasons, as a not-quite-satisfactory cover, and sent off on his own devices. It's been a rough couple of decades. Not only does he have that stain on his record, but he has the evergreen memories of his comrades, left barely recognizable as human, one of whom was – secretly, of course – his lover.

Meanwhile, those fairies that Ben Chaudhry encountered? They have a human hostage, Geoff, who gives every appearance of being one foretold to either be the key to the success of the fae queen's plans, or to the failure thereof.

One aspect I loved about this book was that although the main characters are gay men, not everyone in the book is either gay or a man. It seems like, in my limited experience, so many of the books I've read that feature gay characters seem to reflect some idea that all the people in the general vicinity of the story must be gay. Here, there was a very diverse set of characters surrounding the heroes – and it was great. There were women, and everything!

Lovely writing, a convoluted and unique and thoroughly enjoyable plot – I love a pleasant surprise. ( )

I greatly enjoyed this book, not least because it's gay romance rather then gay porn. The protagonists avoid doing the stupid things that so many romance characters do in order to provide plot obstacles.

My main gripe is that this is half a book. It stops abruptly in the middle of the action, which really pissed me off. ( )