I remember Fire Season and I remember also that my feeling was Lex Valentine is quite an expert on the “classical” paranormal romance, and for classical I mean het romance. This is not a critique, on the contrary, this is probably one of the few time I read an M/M romance where the het couples are as much interesting as the gay ones.

The Tales of the Darkworld series is mixed, I believe that in the past 6 books, 2 are gay and 4 are het, and even if I read only the 2 gay novels, judging by the females in the stories I read, the other 4 books have to be very good as well. They are not overtly original paranormal romances, if not for the odd pairs, they are more good and ordinary stories whose strength is mostly on the characters, both main than supporting. There is actually no negative characters at all, at least not in the 2 books I read, and even the antagonist to Seth and Corey’s love (Will, that BTW was first Corey’s lover and than Seth), is actually quite nice, and I wouldn’t mind to read a story with him.

When I was talking about “odd” pair, it was not much about Seth, who is a werewolf (even if his cousin is mated with a dragon), but more about Corey, a wildling, i.e. a fae. When Seth meets Corey, the wildling is a sunny creature, very open and friendly, and more than ready to help Seth testing his sexuality; Seth has always questioned being gay, but before Corey he had no proofs. After the meeting, a little scared, a little elated by the discovery, Seth runs away to test his newfound sexual freedom, leaving a disrupted Corey trying to understand what he did to scare away his mate… yes since, for once, the shapeshifter with the best “nose”, was unable to recognize the mate bond, he mistook it for an aftershave!

That is what I was saying, even if the elements the author used for her story are quite ordinary, she put them together in an original way, and the story is a mix of romance, comedy and erotica, all of them balanced in the right way to not take over the others.

http://pinkpetalbooks.com/Sunstroked-Lex-Valentine.html

Buy Here

Amazon Kindle: Sunstroked (Tales of the Darkworld)
Publisher: Pink Petal Books (October 7, 2010)

Series: Tales of the Darkworld
1) Shifting Winds
2) Hot Water
3) Fire Season: http://elisa-rolle.livejournal.com/762991.html
4) Ride The Lightning
5) Common Ground
6) Sunstroked

Reading List:

http://www.librarything.com/catalog_bottom.php?tag=reading list&view=elisa.rolle