Review: Excellent m/m historical mystery romance
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 10 5, 2012
This is probably one of Lanyon's grittier mysteries. Set during WWII, Snowball in Hell tells the story of Nathan Doyle and Mathew Spain, both injured from the war and are now in Los Angeles, Spain serving as a police lieutenant and Doyle working as a reporter on the police beat. They meet for the first time when a corpse is pulled out from the tar pits, and while tracking down the killer, Spain and Doyle become embroiled into something far deeper and more intimate than they could have imagined.Tightly written, detail-rich, and with a deep-set noir feel, Lanyon builds the mystery and the growing relationship between Spain and Doyle slowly but steadily, like pushing a snowball up a hill. As the story progresses, that snowball starts to become too big to ignore for the characters, and the momentum it gains too overpowering to stop.This book doesn't have the lighter humor that infuses some of Lanyon's other mysteries, like the Adrien English series. Instead, it's a taut story thick with tension, and not just for the spiraling murder mystery with its many suspects, but also with the attraction between Spain and Doyle, an attraction deemed so wrong by society that any touch on the arm or long look has to be quickly put in check in case suspicion arises. That unfortunate realism that Lanyon includes makes this read a little more of a downer, but along with that, he slides in that slow building hope of something better, something greater that can be had if the characters deem it worth fighting for, and living for.Recommended if you're looking for a very well-written mystery with a nice slow building romance and a shyly tentative but hopeful HFN ending. (And Lanyon has on his website that a sequel is planned.) It's a wonderful read, highly recommended, and one that can be easily pointed to when explaining why Lanyon is one of the best writers in the genre. It's not an easy story, but it's a good one.(And if you like this one, I also recommend Lanyon's This Rough Magic, which is slightly lighter in tone, but is also an excellent historical mystery romance set in 1930's LA.)