London Underground worker Mal Thomas is staying in Porthkennack to recover from a traumatic experience. Getting more bad news from home is the last straw¿until big, blond museum curator Jory Roscarrock steps up to offer some comfort.As a doctor of English literature, Jory should be in a prestigious post at a top university. But a youthful indiscretion led him to abandon academia to come back to … come back to his hometown, Porthkennack, and the controlling family he¿s never really felt a part of. He¿s delighted to find a kindred spirit in Mal.
But Jory¿s family hurt Mal¿s best friend deeply, and while Jory is desperate to repair the damage, his own mistakes threaten to keep him and Mal apart. Meanwhile, Mal is torn between his feelings for Jory and his duty to his friend¿and his fears that a failed relationship could be more than his shattered confidence can take. Jory must convince Mal it¿s worth risking everything for their love.
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Reviews by the Wicked Reads Review Team
Sarah –
3.5 stars
This is another angst filled addition to the Porthkennack series. A chance meeting between aristocratic Jory and Mal, a visitor from London, leads to a complicated relationship and even messier relationships between the Roscarrock family and Mal’s friends in Porthkennack.
This is the ninth book in the series, but readers really only need to have read the first book by the same author to understand this one. It’s a more coherent story than the first book, but it is just as tangled and gritty. For me, this is missing both the magical sense of place and the complex character development I’ve loved in other stories in this series. I liked both Jory and Mal. I felt sorry for both of them at times – but I didn’t fall madly in love with either of them.
Once again, we get a whole lot of local legend and lore – including more historical smuggling and the history of the Roscarrock family – and I enjoyed the way this builds on various stories in the series. This isn’t my favourite of the Porthkennack books, but it was an entertaining read.
Reviewers received a free copy of this book to read and review for Wicked Reads.
What a wonderful story!
I haven’t read most of the Porthkennack stories but that didn’t detract from my enjoyment of this one at all. I can clearly see there are characters from earlier novels, but they add to the story and didn’t make me feel like I was missing anything. I’m sure if you’ve read previous books you’d enjoy it all the more.
This was a great ‘insta-love’ story which was really well done (JL Merrow always does this genre really nicely). There was enough damage and drama to make it interesting without being angsty and the romance part was sweet and hot.
If you’re looking for a nice, easy romance with interesting characters and some creative local lore then One Under is going to fit the bill perfectly.
The Drama Llama chewed this story up and spat it back out. I tried, I really tried very hard to like this story, but I felt no connection to or interest in the characters at all. In fact, I really thought Mal was a bit of a shit and could not fathom what Jory saw in him.
Perhaps I am being unfair because I have never read a Porthkennack book, and seeing as how this one was #9 in the series, maybe I should have, but I was under the impression that each book was a stand-alone that simply took place in the same world/setting as the others. I’m still not sure if I was right or wrong about that, but early on Mal spouts out so many names without giving a reference or explaining anything about the character that belonged to said name, and I found myself completely at a loss as to who they were, what their significance was, and why I should care about them.
It took far too long to find out what the drama/trauma was that made each character so messed up, and when I did eventually find out, I didn’t find either event to be worthy of such melodramatic disaster. Both Mal and Jory needed to be reminded that they were grown men, not a couple of immature teenage boys. Jory is 32 years old for crying out loud and still lets his brother run his life. He skulks around his home, trying to hide his climbing gear, his occasional drink, and his preference for men. I wanted to scream at him: Put your big boy panties on, grow the hell up, move out of your family home, date whoever the hell you want, and go back to your real job.
And then there was Mal. Uck, I did not care for him at all. I understand that he is traumatized by the terrible event at work, but he’s moping around a pub, leading Jory on and then tossing him aside whenever it’s inconvenient, and basically being a total prat. He makes a mountain out of the Dev/Jory mole hill when what he really needed was to pull his head out of his ass and go to counseling.
Okay, so in the end, they did grow on me ever so slightly because they finally got their acts together, but at that point it was just too late. My apologies to J.L. Merrow, whose work I usually love (The Plumber’s Mate Mysteries, anybody?), but I just found One Under to be a real struggle to invest in.
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