Read these over the weekend, and basically they are pretty good books. I'd give em a solid 3 stars, but not for the reasons you'd imagine. Gonna spoil a few things, so fair warning.
Be warned, the "gary stu" is STRONG with these books. The main character is a PI ex cop who is in his 40s-50s and basically discovers he's a Fae and has amazing abilities, etc. The author is also an ex cop who is retired, so the main character kinda screams "Gary Stu" pretty hard.
HOWEVER, and this is a HUGE however, it's not handled in an awful way. Seems like every time I read a book where the author is a self insert, it's horrible. The general "every woman wants him" and "badass enough to kick anything's ass" IS present in the books BUT it's not overdone.
The reason I don't rate the books higher is because not much happens. Yes the lead character discovers he's a magic fae who happens to be king, yes he sleeps with a few women. The problem is there isn't much actually going on as far as PI work not to mention there's no real overreaching plot to the books that really gets resolved. You never really fear for the characters in the book, everyone has solid plot armor, and there's no big pressure for anyone to do anything. There's no "we have to stop the apocalypse!" or "we have to stop this witch from killing 30 children in a blood sacrifice!" or even really a "we need to stop this evil fae from walking into that bar!" in the books. The plot is basically how the main character handles his ascension to King/God of the Fae and how the evil fae want to kill him.
The reason I didn't rate this a 2 star or even a 1.5 star set of books is that the writing IS done very well, and the main character doesn't really come across as a gigantic badass protagonist. He's a guy, who has a day job and suddenly OH SHIT FAERIES ARE REAL and it gets weird. He's written as a normal joe and I dig that. It kinda slides around a bit in the second book, but still he's not written as the next coming of Jesus personified who will smite all the wrongdoers while having sex with all the babes and kickflipping off evil fae nazi heads while cracking one liners.
Not great, not bad, and I feel safe in saying they are worth the kindle price easily.
I really do wonder what's going to happen in the series, but mostly the downside of the books (to me) is that the overreaching plot is just the basic fantasy trope of "evil people vs good king" and not anything that feels like there's a time limit or pressure. There's no feeling of danger, there's no feeling of consequences, there's just a basic plot that goes along.
Also, and this is on a personal note, I really appreciate that when the character does actually have sex it's treated as a fade to black sort of moment instead of a point by point breakdown of details I don't wanna know.
It's just one of my hang ups I guess. Sex in books is fine. Weird kinky sex in books is fine. Badly written sex that does nothing to advance the plot is not fine.
All in all, between them being fairly cheap for kindle books, as well as book 2 being available for prime lending, I think they are worth a read.
Link to amazon for the books :
http://www.amazon.com/Tom-Keller/e/B008HF3WNM/
