Book Title: The Man in Black
Author: L.R. Liverpool
Publisher: Black Cab Productions / Texas Poetrope
Cover Artist: Gabriel Sanche
Release Date: November 22, 2022
Tense/POV: First person, past tense, single POV
Genres: MM Historical Romance/Thriller
Tropes: Enemies to lovers, forbidden love, dangerous environment, solving mysteries
Themes: Old West, outlaws, mysterious pursuer, hurt/comfort, murders, emotional traumas, scary dreams
Heat Rating: 4 flames
Length: 897 pages in Kindle format
It is a standalone story and does not end on a cliffhanger.
Buy Links
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Who will be safe when a dream figure becomes real?
Blurb
Naive dreamer Fenimore James goes west to become a famous outlaw, but his fantasies of glamorous robberies quickly evaporate when he joins the Red Evans gang, finding himself caught in a strange and bloody game, where gang members are suddenly being murdered one-by-one at the hand of a mysterious pursuer, who leaves cryptic signs scarifying their bodies. As his nights become plagued by a bizarre dream figure––the Man In Black, he also begins to question his sexuality, falling for a fellow male gang member, whom he feared just recently.
My name is Fenimore James and not so long ago I was unhappy with my life.
As you might’ve already gathered, my problem started with that gall-darned stupid name. May my good old folks forgive me, but who in their right mind would think of calling their child Fenimore? It has jarred me ever since I could remember. Imagine the scene: I was walking along by myself and suddenly somebody shouted for all to hear, “Hey, Fenny!” What a disgrace. But still better than when some elderly mother’s friend pronounced its full version with feeling––“FENIMORE…JAMES!”
“Besides all that, I was dissatisfied with my appearance as well. With my clothes, to be precise. That was a rather recent discovery. I dressed the same way as everyone else around. Conveniently, comfortably, ordinary. You don’t really think about what you’re wearing when you are working on a farm or sitting on the porch. But one day, I came up to a mirror and all of a sudden I clearly realized that I looked like a hillbilly. That made my mom blow up major! Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mean to say that hardworking farmers looked like hillbillies; it was just in the light of my new self-spirited discoveries, I realized I did not like the way I looked. My clothes were far from what I wanted to wear.
Once, a famous gunslinger visited our town, and I still remember how I wanted a similar hat, a similar jacket with bronze buttons, a similar fiery and flashy neckerchief. The painful truth about those dudes is that everything fits them. And if I really dressed that way, I would have felt uncomfortable and would’ve looked like the same old hillbilly, just dressed up silly for a saloon dance. But I wish my problems would have ended there. ‘Cause on that clear September morning, five years ago, I woke up at dawn with one single thought: I was unhappy with my whole damn life.
On the one hand, I lived quite well, in a kind of comfortable routine. My father was a county treasurer, but he left his post to engage in what he considered his life calling: farming. We never became prosperous farmers, but we were no beggars either. Things were going steady and smoothly, which meant that, in general, I was confident in the future. And confident that tomorrow would be pretty much the same as today. That had its pros and cons. I knew no fear and hunger, but I also didn’t know what adventures were like. Our family knew everyone in the town, and everyone in it knew us. I, my two brothers and my sister, were the first generation that grew up on that land. In a word, I was green, as you can understand. But I was always an adventurer at heart. I knew that I didn’t necessarily look like one though. When a local seller took my word that I would bring him the missing amount owed, I went straight home to get it, not even thinking that I could bring it the next day while passing by––let alone get it out of my head entirely. After all, the amount was meager, and the seller was about ninety years old and was unlikely to remember my face tomorrow.
Lily has been writing short stories to entertain her friends since her teen years, and before coming to pen her own novel, she helped her writer friends with research for their fiction and non-fiction. She is a collector of all things dogs, and Balto & Togo, an animal shelters volunteer, a history buff, a vintage trinkets and toys enthusiast.
