This whole series is potato chips for me: light, crispy snacks with a little bit of sex and salty language that don’t have enough substance to satisfy my appetite. These are light urban fantasy mysteries with silly banter and rather juvenile MM love stories.
In this one, we have Hellhound Alastair and feline shifter Aiden, two guys who’ve each been around for centuries and yet still feel like teenagers. In Alastair’s case, he’s the class clown of the series (and that’s saying something in a series built on jazz hands exuberance). He sleeps with guys and then gets others to dump them via text because he can’t even. There’s a not very credible info dump making him out to be a super smart spy in his prior career, as if he’s crazy like a fox, but I never got to the point where I could take him seriously. Per the usual romance formula, there’s virtually nothing other than lust and forced proximity to bring them together for two sex scenes utterly lacking in chemistry.
Honestly, I think I’d prefer the sex to fade to black.
The mystery arc here spends a lot of time to punt to the next and final book, really only serving add new players/species to the looming climax with the bad guys. There’s still a lot of telling instead of showing and I was particularly disappointed at the lack of scenes where villains appear, have lines, or fight it out. This passed the time okay, but if I hadn’t bought the whole series, I’d have stopped after book 1.