Review: Dancing Men by Adira August

Title: Dancing Men

Series: Hunter Dane Investigation: Book Two

Author: Adira August

Publisher: Self-Published/Kindle Unlimited

Length: 387 Pages

Category: Mystery/Suspense, Police Procedural, BDSM

At a Glance: Hunter and Cam still have that incredible, delicious tension, now stretched across three books, and that’s all down to the great writing style of Adira August.

Reviewed By: Carrie

Blurb: You have to bury the past, or the past will bury you.

An ancient burial urn, empty for millennia, is suddenly not so empty.

When Detective Lieutenant Hunter Dane probes a murder at the Natural History Museum, his own past haunts him. To solve the complex case, Hunter needs Camden Snow, the brilliant, beautiful, “no limits” Dom who’d helped him unravel a very peculiar, and very personal, murder.

But Cam’s ready to kill Hunt, himself! Their intense D/s relationship began in a playroom, but ended up in an emergency room.

Review: Dancing Men is technically the third book in the series, even though it is just the second ‘Investigation’ book. This book takes a little turn to the left with the flow of the series and focuses more on the mystery than the intense relationship between our two MCs. Don’t get me wrong, Hunter and Cam are still revolving around each other with the push and pull reminiscent of two planets. The chemistry and the magnetic pull are still there; they are just feeling themselves out more and discovering who they are together, and making small in-roads into where they want to be and what the future holds. Even though this book is marked as a standalone, it’s not. Nothing about these books is standalone; start with the first one and go from there. While the murder mystery may be new, the relationship between our MCs certainly isn’t, and the supporting cast has been established in earlier books.

Pay attention. That’s the best advice I can give you. This mystery is a complicated one, and the amount of research the author probably had to do to make this plausible is staggering. There are layers on layers here. For me, it was great because I love books like that. Books that have several threads woven into their framework, and you cannot see the whole tapestry of the story until you are done with it.

Hunter has two puzzles to unravel in this mystery. One: who killed the poor person in the bottom of the thousand-year-old urn, and two: just who is Camden Snow? Cam has had enough of Hunter running away, and knows that the only way to get Hunter to admit his true feelings is to make him stop and see him. See all of him, not just the Dom Hunter needs for stress relief. At the end of book two, Hunter runs away, and Cam won’t accept that behavior from him again. They have to learn to work together in this book, to be a team—both in bed and out of it. As much as these two men trust each other within the paradigm of a D/s relationship, they are precious shy of trust outside of it. As for the police investigation, the clues start to add up, and a generations-old love story is revealed, which was both scandalous and passionate. You will not figure this one out ahead of time, people. I didn’t, not really, and that’s so very unusual for me. I’m not going to mention much about the mystery because to do so would give the story away, and I won’t do that.

Hunter and Cam still have that incredible, delicious tension, now stretched across three books, and that’s all down to the great writing style of Adira August. These are such well written books, and they have such a depth to them that Hunter and Cam have made my list of all-time favorite Dom/sub pairings. Geez, these guys give everything to each other. This book ends with Hunter and Cam in a relatively good place, but there are hints their newfound peace will be shattered in book four. I cannot wait to see how August wraps up the epic love story contained in this four book series, and I just know that on the off chance she wanted to make it five, I would support that endeavor wholeheartedly. Highly recommend!

You can buy Dancing Men here:
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