Review: Frayne and Tyack, once more, with feeling.
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 26, 2013
Gad, I love Harper Fox's writing.  "Tinsel Fish" is the sequel to "Once Upon a Haunted Moor," and is set in the same Cornish countryside. Small-town copper, Gideon Frayne, takes a holiday near Christmas time and heads to Falmouth to see his new boyfriend, clairvoyant Cornishman Lee Tyack. Although a novella in length, Fox has created a full, richly seasoned story that satisfies and scrimps on nothing.Where the first book focused on Frayne and Tyack learning to work together to solve a child abduction case in a small town, this second book makes the core mystery slightly secondary to the development of the two men's relationship with each other.  Fox is a brilliant character-writer, and both Gideon and Lee come to life for the reader as much as for each other.  To enrich the tale even more, we are introduced to Gideon's family, and find more complexity and nuance in his rigid religious upbringing than we might ever have imagined.Fox has written this as a Christmas-timed release, and indeed the entrance of religious faith and spiritual connectedness are most appropriate to the season. But the power in this particular novella ultimately comes from the unresolved tension that Fox brings to her narrative through the presence of religion and faith as powerful influences in her characters' lives.  The success that Frayne and Tyack have in coming to terms with each other is entirely based in accepting that nothing is ever simple; that uncertainty is the only absolute.  Love might not conquer all, but love can make anything bearable.