Softpaw, by Osiris and Beryll Brackhaus

[Ulysses]

Softpaw (Patte de Velours) (Smilodon Pride 1)
By Osiris and Beryll Brackhaus
Published by the authors, 2018
Five stars

It’s interesting that the English title of this book is “Softpaw,” because the French title, “Patte de Velours” translates directly as “velvet paw.” That’s something I remember people (including myself) saying to their cats when they were training them to play without using their claws. Anyway, in this book it turns out to be the family nickname of the title character, Connor Acothley, an American of complicated non-white ancestry who, as it happens, is also a saber-toothed panther shifter.

Got that? If you can’t embrace this essential detail, then don’t bother with the book. If a saber-toothed panther is just what you’re looking for, you’ll get a kick out of this book.

Connor currently lives in Paris, on a houseboat on the Seine in the Marais. The Marais used to be the seedy area of Paris east and north of Notre Dame, but has in the last generation or so become the flourishing center of a vibrant Parisian gay community. Indeed, Connor plays the piano at a celebrated gay nightclub called Chez Chantal, named for its elderly drag queen creator. Connor has found his milieu and his community.

However, there seems to be a serial killer loose in the Marais, one who leaves bloodless corpses of young male prostitutes on rooftops. Connor feels it is his duty to prowl the roofs of the Marais at night to try to prevent this modern-day Jack-the-Ripper from killing again.

One cold rainy night, a new, slightly more mature rentboy walks into Chez Chantal – the gorgeous, muscled Michel Payet. Connor is smitten, but also alarmed – another vulnerable target for the vicious killer in his neighborhood. Another human for Connor to try to protect.

What Connor doesn’t know is that Michel is an undercover agent for the French police, brought in specifically because of his background as a youthful street hustler himself in this very neighborhood. A child of Paris’s worst high-rise tenements in the outer suburbs, Michel knows his way around the streets. He is as intrigued by this mysterious piano-playing American as Connor is in him.

The first book in a series, “Softpaw” is a straightforward m/m romance with a supernatural twist. The Brackhauses write the books they want to write, and not all of them, even in one series, are necessarily of the same genre. I liked the Smilodon shifter idea, and hope that some of the future books in the series will take us back to Paris and to Conner.