Just got an amazing review for Office of the Lost, releasing tomorrow (6/21), from Ulysses at Paranormal Romance Guild!
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About The Book
When Perfection Collides With Chaos, Sparks Fly
Crispin Eladrin, desk fae at the Office of the Lost, could find a needle in ten haystacks. His desk is so neat it would make an accountant blush, and he’s never failed to complete a recovery mission. He has no idea how adorable he is, especially when he’s at his most annoyingly officious.
Enter utterly chaotic Leopold Lane. His life is a masterclass in disastrous events–and it’s about to get worse. He’s the latest thing that Crispin has been sent to retrieve, but when they meet, sparks fly. Literally. And now they must find their way back before someone—or something—enchants them, eats them, or stomps them to death.
Neither knows why the Office of the Lost is so hell-bent on acquiring Leo, but they’re determined to survive long enough to find out–and to see if opposites really do attract.
The Review
This marvelous new collaboration between Scott Coatsworth and Kim Fielding is both farcical and frightening—not to mention poignant and thought-provoking. If it reminded me of anything I’ve read before, it might be T.J. Klune’s “Tales of Verania” series.
The story is full of twists. At first it seems like a sort of classic opposites attract romance—when Crispin, as self-defined “desk fae,” is sent out to find Leopold Lane and bring him back to the Office of the Lost. Crispin, although his mother is the Queen of the Fae, has chosen a quiet, orderly life as a curator in the Office of the Lost (an eerie entity described in the book as being something like the warehouse shown at the end of “Raiders of the Lost Ark). Leopold, on the other hand, is what one might describe as a hot mess. Clumsy and unlucky, everything in his life seems to go awry.
The moment Crispin finds Leopold, things start to go wrong, launching these two young guys into an adventure that bounces them through several of the many worlds in the universe. The entire arc of the narrative is discovering what’s happened and why—and along the way discovering who Leopold and Crispin really are.
As a retired museum curator, I could fully embrace the idea of the Office of the Lost, filled with unseen treasures being kept safe until they are needed. The definition of what makes something a treasure is important here, as well as the idea of what makes something useful. This is not a world most readers think about, and the authors take their time making sense of it.
As the subtitle suggests, this is the set-up for a series, and not just a single rollicking story by itself. The authors create a crazy, terrifying-yet-hilarious world in which we ultimately realize both Crispin and Leopold are important (but don’t know it yet). The authors’ imaginations are on full-speed-ahead, and their use of dialogue and action, as well as vivid description, keeps the reader turning the pages.
Of course, the book’s m/m roots show in the backstories of both main characters. These are lonely young men who try hard not to dwell on what they lack in their lives. The chaos unleashed by their initial meeting becomes the pathway to self-discovery. The reader falls for both Crispin and Leopold, despite their rather enormous differences. Good hearts, gentle souls, best intentions. For me, that’s an emotional trifecta.
I can’t wait for the next book in the series, and hope there are many to come.
Five stars.
The Reviewer
Ulysses Grant Dietz grew up in Syracuse, New York, where his Leave It to Beaver life was enlivened by his fascination with vampires, from Bela Lugosi to Barnabas Collins. He studied French at Yale, and was trained to be a museum curator at the University of Delaware. A curator since 1980, Ulysses has never stopped writing fiction for the sheer pleasure of it. He created the character of Desmond Beckwith in 1988 as his personal response to Anne Rice’s landmark novels. Alyson Books released his first novel, Desmond, in 1998. Vampire in Suburbia, the sequel to Desmond, is his second novel.
Ulysses lives in suburban New Jersey with his husband of over 41 years and their two almost-grown children.
By the way, the name Ulysses was not his parents’ idea of a joke: he is a great-great grandson of Ulysses S. Grant, and his mother was the President’s last living great-grandchild. Every year on April 27 he gives a speech at Grant’s Tomb in New York City.
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