Welcome to Alex Beecroft visiting Love bytes for the Trowchester Blues blog tour

Sharing an excerpt and there is a giveaway to participate in

Welcome Alex!

 

 

Blurb

 

Michael May is losing it. Long ago, he joined the Metropolitan Police to escape his father’s tyranny and protect people like himself. Now his father is dead, and he’s been fired for punching a suspect. Afraid of his own rage, he returns to Trowchester—and to his childhood home, with all its old fears and memories. When he meets a charming, bohemian bookshop owner who seems to like him, he clings tight.

 

Fintan Hulme is an honest man now. Five years ago, he retired from his work as a high class London fence and opened a bookshop. Then an old client brings him a stolen book too precious to turn away, and suddenly he’s dealing with arson and kidnapping, to say nothing of all the lies he has to tell his friends. Falling in love with an ex-cop with anger management issues is the last thing he should be doing.

 

Finn thinks Michael is incredibly sexy. Michael knows Finn is the only thing that still makes him smile. But in a relationship where cops and robbers are natural enemies, that might not be enough to save them.

“You are a disciple of Quentin Crisp, I see.” Fintan Hulme is being rude about my house, but I can’t really resent it because he’s right. Quentin Crisp maintains that after seven years of not dusting, the dust never gets any deeper, and I’ve always found that this is true.

 

“You do a lot of dusting yourself?” I ask pointedly while I put the kettle on.

 

I surprise a look of rueful amusement on his face as he tosses his gloves on the coffee table and turns to examine my bookshelves. “What did I see written on your fridge? ‘Only uninteresting women have perfect houses’? It is no less true for gentlemen. I have better things to do with my time.”

 

He’s a slight man, about the same height as me – that’s five foot five. Not tall at all, especially not for a man. But there’s something larger than life about him. He’s got a movie-star quality and a vibrancy that means you can’t possibly think of him as small. He doesn’t really look like Algernon from Brideshead Revisited, but something about him reminds me of that ill-fated heart-throb nevertheless. I’m not sure what it is, unless it’s just his clothes. He does dress like an extra from an episode of Poirot, but to be fair he carries the style off as though he invented it.

 

Now he brushes back the floppy blond fringe of his hair as he reaches out for The Book of Poisons by Gustav Schenk. “This is nice. Do you use it?”

 

“I’ve always thought it would come in handy if I was going to write a murder mystery,” I admit, setting out tea pot and cups. We have chocolate hobnobs, and even Finn is not too proud to to take a couple.

 

“I half expected you to insist on home made or at least artisan produced from the local deli.”

 

“Darling,” he cuts me a reproving look from those cynical green eyes. “Surely you of all people know me better. When was I ever pretentious?”

 

“That’s not what I mean.” My characters are like this. They always give me trouble. They always insist on being something that isn’t quite what I was expecting, and I sometimes think they don’t like or respect me very much. “I mean that you appreciate the unusual so much. You support all those local artists. You almost wrecked your new life because you couldn’t say no to a rare book. You spend all your time at Idris’s ridiculous tea shop. I’m ashamed to give you something mass produced when you delight so much in the unique.”

 

He laughs, and his good nature shines out from behind the prickliness. “You gave me Michael. I feel it would be sheer greed to demand anything more. I owe you for that, you know.”

 

“No you don’t.” I made him and I want him to be happy. I gave him all his problems and I took them away and it’s kind of uncomfortable for him to thank me for anything. “I was worried about Michael, and I wanted someone to look after him, and you did. I owe you for that, so we’re kind of even.”

 

Fourth wall breaking. I think I’m out of my depth. Particularly when Finn gives me a lopsided smile, so ancient it might have graced the face of a druid, or something earlier. The man has a dash of the fey about him that to my mind makes him dangerous.

 

“You love Michael more than me,” he says, and sips his tea with raised eyebrows, a challenging look.

 

I fumble for a response. The truth is that I find Michael easier to love, because I understand his childhood of fear and the fury it creates. I understand what it’s like to be depressed and lost and broken like him. I don’t really understand Finn’s aggressive self-confidence, his assertiveness and self-sabotage and enjoyment of pain. I have a kneejerk dislike towards being dominated, and Finn is a brightly plumed little cockerel who walks all over people so cleverly they hardly notice him doing it. I love him because I couldn’t have written him if I hadn’t, but it’s another uncomfortable truth that perhaps I do love Michael more.

 

I’m sorry, I think, and he gives that twisted smile. He is his own master now and always, and he doesn’t give a shit what I think.

 

 

About the Author

 

Alex Beecroft is an English author best known for historical fiction, notably Age of Sail, featuring gay characters and romantic storylines. Her novels and shorter works include paranormal, fantasy, and contemporary fiction.

 

Beecroft won Linden Bay Romance’s (now Samhain Publishing) Starlight Writing Competition in 2007 with her first novel, Captain’s Surrender, making it her first published book. On the subject of writing gay romance, Beecroft has appeared in the Charleston City Paper, LA Weekly, the New Haven Advocate, the Baltimore City Paper, and The Other Paper. She is a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association of the UK and an occasional reviewer for the blog Speak Its Name, which highlights historical gay fiction.

 

Alex was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She lives with her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.

 

Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid, and recently taken up an 800-year-old form of English folk dance, but she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.

 

She is represented by Louise Fury of the L. Perkins Literary Agency.

 

Connect with Alex:

• Website: alexbeecroft.com
• Blog: alexbeecroft.com/blog
• Facebook: facebook.com/AlexBeecroftAuthor
• Twitter: @Alex_Beecroft

• Goodreads: goodreads.com/Alex_Beecroft

 

 

Every comment on this blog tour enters you in a drawing for an e-book from Alex Beecroft’s backlist (excepting Trowchester Blues). Entries close at midnight, Eastern time, on February 15. Contest is NOT restricted to U.S. entries.