The Tin Star / J.L. Langley

The Tin Star by J.L. Langley. 290 p.

Ethan's best friend John comes over to Ethan's ranch, The Tin Star, with news that Jamie, John's little brother, has been kicked off their father's ranch because he told his father he was gay. Ethan, who's gay but not out except to his close friends (like John), thinks Jamie was foolish to come out because life will be tough in ranch country and their small Texas town for an openly gay cowboy. He offers Jamie a job at the Tin Star. Once Jamie arrives, Ethan realizes that he's very attracted to Jamie, and they start up a romance. In between sex scenes they try to figure out who's harassing them, damaging property and eventually shooting Ethan.

This is pretty much pure fluff--not that there's anything wrong with that. I had a terrible time taking the dialogue seriously; I don't have the book here to quote from, but there's lots of "boy howdy" cowboy-isms sprinkled throughout. Then again, I've never met a cowboy in person; it's possible that the speech patterns are accurate, and they just sound like a goofy cliche to me because of my ignorance. I was a bit more thrown by the plot; at the beginning of the book Ethan strongly believes that coming out in his situation would just be foolish and make managing his ranch more difficult, so I would expect it to be a bigger deal when he decides to do it later in the book. Yet it reads almost like an afterthought. Similarly, the harassment that Jamie and Ethan undergo didn't really seem menacing; it was just plot to fill the space between love scenes. I didn't expect serious realism or anything, but the tone seemed a little too facile to suit me.

Overall, my dabbling in the male/male romance arena wasn't terribly successful--the first (Lovers' Knot) didn't have enough romance and the second (PsyCop: Partners) didn't have enough detail about the plot or the romance. This one was closest to what I'd consider a good romance in the erotica category, but it was a bit too goofy for me. Then again, if I picked three random titles off a list of ten het romances, I'm not sure I'd have any better odds of finding on that I really liked.