Black Magic. Blackmail. Little Black Books. Must a witch break his vows to save his marriage?
Cosmo Saville loves that his husband has finally accepted his witchy ways. And in return, his promise to stay out of police business guarantees them a happily ever after. At least, until he discovers he might be responsible for a dangerous game of blackmail…
Police Commissioner John Joseph Galbraith feels relieved that his marriage is back on track. Especially since he has his hands full with a high-profile suicide and rumors of a city-wide extortion ring. But when he stumbles across Cosmo breaking his vow by playing cop, John agonizes over old wounds.
With the commissioner’s badge and family in jeopardy, Cosmo has no choice but to put his life on the line…
Can the witch expose a dark conspiracy, save John’s career, and return to love’s delicious spell?
Bell, Book and Scandal is the third book in the Bedknobs and Broomsticks romantic gay mystery trilogy. If you like quirky characters, snappy spells, and madcap suspense, then you’ll love Josh Lanyon’s supernatural story.
HOLY HANNAH BATMAN!!! Bell, Book, and Scandal is even better than imagined. And trust me, I imagined quite a bit. Josh Lanyon is one of my favorite authors, she is my go-to mystery author in the LGBT genre combined with how much I loved the first two books in the Bedknobs and Broomsticks series I probably went in with pretty high expectations. High expectations when it comes to any kind or level of art is not always a good thing, so few times does the end result match our hopes. Well, Bell was not one of those times.
Nope.
It surpassed my expectations.
Because this is an ongoing series I don't want to give anything away, either for this book specifically or even too much "hinting" of past entries so that I don't spoil anything for newcomers to Bedknobs. I will say this, John has really tested my limits of wanting to smack him upside the head because of his reluctance to look outside the realms of his preconceived box. Don't get me wrong, Cosmo tries my patience too with his hole "speak, speak again, then speak some more, and finally think" habit of tackling obstacles in his life.
I think that's one of the elements I love best about this series, both characters have serious flaws in how they express themselves. Between their pissing each other off, jumping to conclusions, and then realizing just what the other person was actually thinking, John and Cosmo really are a perfect fit. The blending of similar and different qualities really revs their chemistry up to such believable levels that if the author were ever to kill one of them off, the remaining one left behind would never find another that fills in all the gaps. We all know there will never be any major character death here but I guess it's just my way of saying how perfect they compliment and complete each other.
Now, the mystery.
Okay, you know you aren't getting any tidbits in that area from me so I'll just say this: I could see it unfold in front of me as if I was a fly on the wall, right smack dab in the middle of the room witnessing it all. That's how real Josh Lanyon makes this paranormal, supernatural, magical world, you know it's fiction but it's 150% believable all at the same time.
As for the supporting cast of characters? I don't want to give anything away by bringing them up individually but I will say that not a single character in this series is page filler. Each and everyone of them plays a part in the end result, or at the very least getting the reader so involved in the story that pretty soon you forget it's a story and it feels like you are reliving a memory spent with old friends.
Magic, likeable(and some not-so likeable) characters that you can relate to, mystery that keeps you on the edge of your seat, romance, humor, drama, action, but most importantly Bell, Book, and Scandal(the whole series really) has so much heart, so many feels, you don't want to say goodbye. And it doesn't look like we'll have to yet, the author reveals there will be another storyline arc in the future, I guess she wasn't ready to say goodbye either or more accurately, Cosmo and John weren't ready to leave us out of their journey.
I just want to end with a couple of points:
1. If you couldn't tell from my review, Bedknobs and Broomsticks is a continuing story so you have to read from the beginning, you can't jump in with Bell, Book, and Scandal.
2. Something I've said in both the other two book reviews and it rings even truer now than book one, "I loved how it made me nostalgic for the endearing comedy of Bewitched, the magical drama of Charmed, and the spell-driven romance of I Married a Witch."
Definitely a win-win all around.
RATING:
Chapter One
“Merde.”
I scowled and sucked on the slice across the pad of my thumb. I didn’t taste blood, the papercut wasn’t that deep, but my tongue tingled with the flavor of…
Odd.
I picked up the letter opener, slit open the envelope, and several glossy black-and-white photos spilled out and slid across my desk.
Black and white? Who took black-and-white photos these days? Who took photos these days? That’s what phones were for, right?
I reached for the nearest photograph, studied it curiously—and dropped it as though it had burned my fingertips.
A man and woman locked in naked—very naked—embrace.
I didn’t recognize the man, though the large tattooed pentacle on his back indicated maybe I should.
The woman was my sister-in-law. Jinx.
I drew in a deep breath.
Well, this was…unexpected. And unwelcome.
I bowed the envelope to check for a letter. I was anticipating something with misshapen letters cut from magazines and spelling trouble, but there was nothing. Just the photos.
Not that that wasn’t plenty right there.
I rested my fingertips on the photos, closed my eyes, concentrated… To my surprise, there it was. The scintilla of the arcane. Magic.
I opened my eyes.
Curiouser and curiouser.
Was there any possibility this wasn’t a threat? That the intent was…what? Hey, here’s something you might want to keep an eye on? I considered that theory hopefully, but I couldn’t quite convince myself that these photos had been sent with anything but ill intention.
To what end, though?
Money, right? That was the way these things usually worked. Not that I had any practical experience of blackmail.
Yes. Blackmail.
It wasn’t a complete surprise.
Or rather, yes, it was a surprise—especially given that Jinx seemed to be the target—but we weren’t the first family in San Francisco to get one of these poison parcels. John had been losing sleep—a lot of sleep—over the past month with the discovery that the city’s high society appeared to have fallen prey to a well-connected extortion ring.
John is John Galbraith. My husband—but more importantly, in this context at least, SFPD’s new police commissioner.
The plot had only come to light because one of the victims, the Rev. Canon Angela Tzeng had had the guts to go to the police and report an attempt to blackmail her. Tzeng was supposed to be consecrated October 1st as the first female bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Northern California, but her courageous move had been rewarded by the blackmailer releasing information about a teenaged pregnancy to the press. It was the Twenty-First Century. You’d think— But you’d be wrong. The revelation of Tzeng’s youthful mistake was damning information in the eyes of both the public and the diocese. Now Tzeng’s very future in the church was in question.
Needless to say, no other victims had come forward. Not openly. Not officially. But they were out there.
“Someone’s going to get killed,” John had said the other night. He was not a guy for kidding around, and he was not kidding then.
I considered the pile of photos before me. I couldn’t help thinking that choosing Jinx as a blackmail target was kind of a stretch.
Yes, these photos were revealing and embarrassing, but at twenty-five, Jinx was a grown woman. The fact that she was a sexually active grown woman would likely only come as a shock to John. She did not hold public office. She was not married. There was no reason I could see that she shouldn’t have sex with whoever she pleased, although I had to wonder about her good sense in choosing a guy who’d branded himself with the Sigil of Baphomet.
Jinx had been studying with the Duchess for the past few weeks, so she surely knew better. And if this guy was not a poser, if he was Craft, he ought to know better too. But this photo might be months old. When I’d first met Jinx, she’d been a little bit of an occult fangirl. Actually, she was still a little bit of an occult fangirl.
But I digress. As usual.
That the photos had come to me, made me wonder if Jinx had already been approached and had brushed it off. You have to care a lot about what other people think to make a good blackmail victim. When it came to what other people thought, Jinx had, in the mortal vernacular, zero fucks to give. In fact, there had been a time, and not so long ago, when I thought she’d have taken delight in appalling both John, who was twenty years her senior, and her mother, Nola.
And when it came to Nola, who could blame her? I felt the urge to appall Nola now and then myself. Not that I had to try. My existence was enough to keep my mother-in-law in a constant state of pall.
Which meant what?
That the real target was me? The assumption being that I would pay up to keep Jinx’s past from embarrassing her? From embarrassing me? No. From embarrassing John.
Of course.
Because John was the vulnerable one. As Police Commissioner, San Francisco’s first gay police commissioner at that, John was the one with something to lose. The news that the police commissioner’s younger sister was a devil worshipper (oh, I could already hear all the idiotic and ignorant things people would say) would certainly bother the hell out of John—and might even impact his political future. John was an ambitious man. A man with a plan.
So why not send this packet to John?
Oh, right. Because John was as honorable as he was ambitious. He would not be blackmailed. He would see Jinx burned alive—in the court of public opinion, that is—before he paid one cent of blackmail money.
The blackmailer was relying on me to pay up to protect John from himself.
Mistake.
If I had learned anything in the four months I’d been married to John, it was that honesty was the best policy. At least with John.
Mainly by Moonlight by Josh Lanyon(Random Paranomal Tales Part 11)
Bestselling author of over sixty titles of classic Male/Male fiction featuring twisty mystery, kickass adventure and unapologetic man-on-man romance, JOSH LANYON has been called "the Agatha Christie of gay mystery."
Her work has been translated into eleven languages. The FBI thriller Fair Game was the first male/male title to be published by Harlequin Mondadori, the largest romance publisher in Italy. Stranger on the Shore (Harper Collins Italia) was the first M/M title to be published in print. In 2016 Fatal Shadows placed #5 in Japan's annual Boy Love novel list (the first and only title by a foreign author to place on the list).
The Adrien English Series was awarded All Time Favorite Male Male Couple in the 2nd Annual contest held by the Goodreads M/M Group (which has over 22,000 members). Josh is an Eppie Award winner, a four-time Lambda Literary Award finalist for Gay Mystery, and the first ever recipient of the Goodreads Favorite M/M Author Lifetime Achievement award.
Josh is married and they live in Southern California.
SMASHWORDS / iTUNES / SHELFARI
EMAIL: josh.lanyon@sbcglobal.net
Bell, Book, and Scandal #3
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