Cross-posted to Amazon and Goodreads.Happy Trans Day of Visibility! As usual, we’re celebrating with books by trans and/or nonbinary authors and starring trans and/or nonbinary main characters, so please check ’em out! (Also as usual, this post only includes books that weren’t featured in previous years’ dedicated posts, so you can find even more here and here.) You won’t regret meeting John, Caleb, and Gray, and I’m already looking forward to diving into their next set of adventures. In short, this is an epic adventure featuring the strangest love-triangle/threesome/but not really you’ll ever read. Hawk also excels in breaking stereotype through the small touches, such not defaulting to “he” for every foe our heroes fight. The stigma in this world against the “paranormally-abled” is an allegory for the realities in our world of stigma against the LGBTQ community, used to good effect in terms of world-building and character history. Also, I never wanted to smack anyone upside the head, which is my general litmus test for my appreciation of a romance story. I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s one of the best love stories I’ve read, with multiple emotional punches to the gut. The romance arc between these characters evolves naturally, as two people who are attracted to each other, then as two people who evolve feelings for each other, then as two people and an extremely powerful god-like being who evolve feelings for each other - wait. But as usual, Hawk takes the generic and spins it into the amazing. On the romance side, the stuffy government agent and the civilian getting caught up in a case are another well-worn trope. The idea that an entire branch of government is dedicated to it tickled my sense of the ridiculous. On the surface, this series appealed to me because it indulges in one of my favorite urban fantasy tropes, in which the wider world is aware that the supernatural exists in some form. I devoured this series the way Gray devours demons. My reading spree included staying up way too late on a work night. Honestly, my review can be boiled down like this: I purchased the series as a full set, but the books were so good that I didn’t want to pause in between to write individual reviews of each book.

Hunter of Demons by Jordan L. Hawk