Forty-year-old, hard bitten, foul-mouthed, homicide detective, Hiro Santos, suspects the owner of the art studio committed the gory killing. Too bad. There are other things he'd like to do to the gorgeous young man than book him for murder. Worse, his sexy suspect is certifiable. The nutcase claims he's some kind of high wizard from an alternate reality and needs Hiro's help to save their worlds.

While the striking Sable Campion appears a youthful twenty-five, he’s endured over two-hundred lonely years as guardian of the portal between Everlight and Elysium. None of those centuries offered him any experience finding a vicious killer. That's where Hiro Santos comes in; but convincing the virile detective to trust Sable will take all his persuasive skills...and perhaps a bit of magic.

The magic they find in each other's arms will rock each of their realities.

Prior to developing my recent addiction to reading M/M romances, the vast majority of my reading for pleasure was in the form of novels broadly classified as speculative fiction—anything from science fiction and epic fantasy to dystopian societies and alternate universes. I’ve also mentioned before that I spent a good bit of my teenage years reading mystery novels. So, with An Evidence of Magic, I get a little bit of all three—a crime-procedural in an alternate reality featuring two guys who fall in love—as the start of a series that has a lot of potential to be interesting for other reasons too.

Sable Campion is a high wizard and the protector of one of the four magical portals between his home world of Elysium and the parallel universe of Everlight. The other three guardians and three members of the White Council have been brutally murdered, and he’s been tasked to figure out who the killer is. He returns to his home in Everlight through the secret portal only to find someone else has been murdered. In his art studio and the police are already there. The latest gory crime scene is just another day for Hiro Santos, the tough, vulgar, forty-year-old Everlight City homicide detective who catches the case. Sable is his prime suspect, and the cockamamie story Sable weaves about being a wizard from an alternate reality? Yeah, the guy may be inhumanly attractive, but he’s obviously crazy and a killer. In order to save both their worlds, they will need to work together, a partnership that might work just as well in the bedroom too.

Regardless of the specific type of speculative fiction I’m reading, what pulls me into the story is the world the author builds. The story here takes place mostly in Everlight City, part of an alternate reality not that much different from our own. The rest of the scenes happen in Elysium, a magical parallel universe only structurally similar to either ours or Everlight. We don’t get to see much about Elysium in this book, and I’m not going to go into a lot of detail about it, but the dualism created with this first book of the series makes me hope the authors will delve into some of the social ramifications in future books, as these sorts of commentaries are what separates decent spec-fic books from really good ones.

The fact that there are portals between the two universes is not known to many people in Everlight, but the fact that the residents of the nearly utopian Elysium have no idea how to deal with violent crimes means Sable needs help, and Hiro is the perfect man for the job. This story isn’t a mystery so much as a police procedural, so don’t expect to be able to figure out who the culprit is until it becomes obvious to the characters. I mention this because I was reading it as a mystery instead, and while I haven’t allowed that to affect my rating, I was disappointed because I had been looking for clues that weren’t there. Looking at it after-the-fact as a procedural, it’s a straightforward story that’s easy to follow and interesting enough to have kept me turning the page.

The romance itself is fairly straightforward too, once Hiro realizes Sable’s abilities are not just a bunch of hocus-pocus slight-of-hand. It’s essentially an insta-lust/love story, but the dynamic between them is interesting for an unexpected reason. Hiro is your stereotypical 110%-alpha-male cop who doesn’t do relationships and, at forty, has been around long enough to be completely jaded about pretty much everything. What he doesn’t realize about Sable is that in spite of looking to be in his twenties, he’s actually much, much older… by a factor-of-ten. So Sable’s more than familiar with Hiro’s type. Sable’s magic also gives him the power of persuasion, though his powers seem strangely ineffective against Hiro. At any rate, the attraction is inevitable, but Sable knows he’s gotta let the alpha make the first move.

Once they do get together, it’s intense right from the start. Because of this, I was a little concerned about the remaining sex scenes in the book. I have read one book by Kris Michaels prior to this and had an issue with one of the characters that resulted from the initial sex scene. While I didn’t have a similar problem here, I did have a problem as the book progressed. Granted, there will be many readers who find the chemistry and resulting sex between them to be amazing in every single scene—and I’ll agree that the chemistry is quite good—but after the first couple of scenes, they started to feel overdone. There wasn’t much sexual tension in the book, and the insta-lust/love meant this isn’t a slow build. So add to that my impression of the sex scenes being over the top, and it made me a little less than thrilled at the end. Now all that being said, one of the scenes in particular—the magic-drunk scene—was quite hot indeed.

An Evidence of Magic is my second exposure to Kris Michael and my first to Patricia A. Knight. While I’m usually let down a little with romances couched in a second genre for the simple reason that the story isn’t long enough to do either facet justice, I was pleased with this story overall, a feat made all the more remarkable by the fact that there are two background genres in play here. It is the start of a series, and my fascination with the world the authors have built is enough to make me look forward to reading the next one. My only hope is that the romance in the next one will be a little more understated.

The authors generously provided me a complimentary copy of An Evidence of Magic in exchange for this fair and honest review.