I’m reading the new Freya Marske book, A Power Unbound, to review for GeeklyInc. I made a mistake.

To be clear, I have no regrets about reading this book. I enjoyed the prior two (you can find my thoughts on them here and here), and…

…while this book hasn’t yet hit the spy fiction parallels quite as hard (I’m only part way through) it’s still got the intrigue that Marske delivers on so well in her other entries in the series. It also, as you might expect by now if you’ve read my reviews, is extremely horny.

I mean, of course it’s horny. It’s a romance novel with rather detailed prose. Freya Marske has delivered precisely that, twice, with her other books in the series. There was no reason for me to think this story would be anything different.

My mistake was very straightforward. I started reading this oh-so-horny book while traveling for a family reunion. Somewhere along the line, I must have forgotten that these books are romance novels with very sweaty sex scenes.

Luckily, no one read any of A Power Unbound over my shoulder. That’s for the best. This book’s romance & sexy-times focus on a gay D/s relationship between Lord Hawthorn (of the first two novels) and Alan Ross (of the second novel). I’m comfortable letting people know that I’m reading these books. I’m fine telling them what the books are about, and the themes they include. But having a random family member read a sex scene over my shoulder would have felt a bit more embarrassing.

Maybe that’s not a problem for you, or maybe you only read these books where you don’t care whether someone is reading over your shoulder. Either way, here’s a friendly reminder: despite all her erotica to the contrary, Freya Marske isn’t fucking around. She delivers on her promises. And her premises.

Anyway. I’ve been enjoying the book so far. I expect I’ll finish it in the next week (maybe sooner if I’m suddenly more free). It’s setting up to complete the series’ established tensions, but I’m not deep enough in to tell you whether Marske actually finishes everything here or whether she ties up most of the details and leaves room for another kind of sequel beyond this trilogy.

I’ve enjoyed these books enough so far that I’d be happy to see more from Marske in the same setting. I don’t want her to leave this story unfinished; I want the resolution that I think she’s promised (tacitly via genre convention if nowhere else). But if she completes this series and finds that there’re more stories to tell elsewhere, at present I’d happily pick those up too. I might feel differently if this story ends unsatisfyingly… but I don’t think that’s likely to be an issue.

The world could use more queer romance. It could especially use more queer romance with characters I enjoy as much as Marske’s. And as I’ve said about her previous books, the secret magical society setting that she’s created here—with its intrigue and backstabbing and nascent spy genre flavor—is a delightful vehicle for all this.

I’ll have an actual review of this here and on GeeklyInc in a while. In the meantime, enjoy the first two books, A Marvellous Light and A Restless Truth. I certainly did.