Reviewed by Larissa
TITLE: King & Queen
SERIES: Relic Book 3
AUTHOR: Maz Maddox
PUBLISHER: Self-published
LENGTH: 216 pages
RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2021
BLURB:
Running into your one night stand is always awkward.
It’s especially awkward when said hunky hookup pulls you into a secret war over fossils and a kidnapped, newly awakened Albertosaurus shifter.
As if my life wasn’t already a mess (understatement), now I’m cruising through Canada hunting down an ancient monster who tried to kill us, attempting to get my social media career off the ground, and ignoring my feelings for my one time fling.
Royal is hot as fire, funny, brilliant and has a thing for dinosaurs almost as much as I do.
Probably because he is one.
Bonus.
REVIEW:
In Maz Maddox’s King & Queen, we embark on a wild and crazy romp that starts at a fossil dig site in Drumheller, Alberta, Canada. The small town is a dinosaur-themed Mecca for tourists due to the geological wonders of the archeologically rich cliffs surrounding the town. Dinosaur shifter Royal, a nerdy Regaliceratops with nerves of steel and a heart of gold, reluctantly agrees to abandon his “guy in the chair” IT role for RELIC, the under-the-radar, fossil search and rescue vigilante group organization, to do reconnaissance. He’s looking for fossil poachers and dinosaur shifters awakening from beneath the sand, … you know, zombie-style.
Down on his luck drag queen, Blaise Fite, who is as fiery and combatant as his name implies, arrives in Drumheller at the same time as Royal. He plans to visit the dig site to help boost his social media feeds for his job as a self-described “Science Communicator and dinosaur enthusiast”. In fact, Blaise’s life is a “sparkly dumpster fire”. He’s homeless, living out of his ancient van. He has no job and only a desperate hope to parlay his dinosaur geekery into making his dreams of working as a paleontologist come true.
Yet despite his bad luck, Blaise holds tight to his inherent nature. He’s vibrant, energetic, and filled with life. This is a man that would smack a dinosaur on the snout to keep him in line. Royal provides an apt description: “Small and mighty, that was Blaise. A powerful punch of personality in a world of monotony.”
Royal and Blaise meet for the first time, not in Drumheller, but at a club in Calgary. They’re immediately drawn to each other and have a back hallway hookup. To their mutual surprise, they meet up again in Drumheller at the dig site. The second meeting is unconventional and downright dangerous. Blaise’s nosiness and pertinacious attitude embroil him in a dinosaur shifter brawl. The unwitting instigator of the conflict is a newly awakened dinosaur shifter that appeared from out of the sand, zombie-style in the middle of the dig site. He then disappears, presumably kidnapped.
King & Queen is Jurassic Park meets The Birdcage, with some Zombieland thrown in for good measure. Dinosaurs stalking in the dark. Dinosaurs brawling with the intent to maim and kill. Blaise, in his drag queen persona, Sera, leading a team of RELIC operatives, undercover in drag, on a mission to find and extricate the kidnapped shifter from captivity in the basement of a drag club. An eclectic found family of shifters named after the dig site and location where they were found. (For example, Dalton, code name Utah is a Utahraptor. Royal, code name Calgary is a Regaliceratops. etc.) In King & Queen, we even get to see road-tripping with this crazy clan. It’s as amusing and exciting as you’d expect.
The found family aspect of the books strongly resonates. These men couldn’t be more different but they come together seamlessly to form a family unit. Montana takes up the de facto father/big brother authority figure role. Dalton and Royal are “two million-year-old children” who prank and generally act like juvenile delinquents when they are together. They even have their own complicated handshake and nicknames: “Feathers and Frills”, and, my personal favorite, “Fangs and F*ckery”. Then we have cranky Baha, who snarls at everyone, massaging his temples and complaining how they all give him a headache, like a beleaguered older brother.
Montana sets the rules, gives the orders, and basically keeps everyone in line, even if that task often resembles herding kittens. It creates a lively dynamic between the RELIC family members and partners that is equal parts heartwarming and hysterical. So if you were wondering, dinosaurs can in fact have and give warm fuzzy feelings.
The romance in King & Queen bears similarities to that of Dalton and Simon’s romance in Book 1, Smash & Grab. Blaise carries emotional scars from people in his life leaving him. It makes him hesitant to open his heart to anyone. But Royal has his concerns as well. Like Dalton, Royal grapples with allowing himself to be vulnerable despite potential hurt from being left behind. In Dalton and Royal’s case, though, the “leaving” is a fact. Dalton and Royal are essentially immortal but have fallen in love with humans.
So while they’ve already lived for millions of years and will likely live for hundreds, thousands, or millions of years to come, Simon and Blaise will grow old and die, leaving Dalton and Royal behind, mourning the loss, for centuries to come. Yet despite the knowledge of eventual loss, these couples choose to live and love as hard as they can for as long as they can, embracing their family, and not worrying about what comes later.
King & Queen follows in the same vein as the first two books in this series. Maz Maddox spins out a sweet, funny romance packed with adventure, a bit of suspense, and a whole lot of surprising developments. And if you want to dig into it a bit, there is a moral to this story. Ms. Maddoz explains in the note to readers at the end of the book that she very deliberately created Blaise to be a person who is “loud, proud, and can go hiking in skirts.” Blaise epitomizes challenging norms and breaking through barriers, whether it be sexuality, gender expression, or the hard sciences. So now you love Blaise even more, right? So while King & Queen is fun all around and an excellent way to spend a few hours reading, appreciate that you are soaking up positive messaging as well:
“love what you want, who you want, and be yourself”
– Maz Maddox 🦖 🦖 🦖
RATING: 
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