Duke in Hiding, by M.J. O'Shea

[Ulysses]

Duke in Hiding (Un Duc Incognito)
BY M.J. O’Shea
Dreamspinner Press, 2016 (2017 French Edition)
Four stars

This is well-written, standard gay romance, and I liked it a lot. Heath Blackwood has been unceremoniously (if implausibly) dropped into small-town New Hampshire to protect his life. He immediately alienates, and then gets intrigued by Theo Brody, a local landscape gardener who earns his keep in the winter months by tending bar at The Gull. Both Heath and Theo share a love of the land, of nature; but where Heath carries the arrogance of an aristocratic legacy, Theo is a traumatized orphan whose adoptive family is all the shelter he knows. They are sympathetic opposites, each puzzled and intrigued by the other while not being on quite the same page.

I give bonus points to O’Shea for using an actual ducal name from a defunct (but famous) English Dukedom – the Dukes of Kingston. Heath’s personality has been molded by his family and his title – as has Theo’s. But Theo, beaten down by tragedy and relative poverty, is as unaware of his personal attractions as Heath is sure of his.

If there were any details that irritated me, it was Theo’s strangely selfish inability to grasp a world larger than the one in which he has placed himself. Heath seems to adapt to Theo’s world far more readily than the reverse. I found I wanted to slap Theo for being a dope – and then was much relieved to see that his closest friends felt that way, too.