It's Delovely, by Frank W. Butterfield (Whit & Eddie #6)

[Ulysses]

It’s Delovely (Whit & Eddie #6)
By Frank W. Butterfield
Published by the author, 2020
Five stars

I’m loving the Whit & Eddie series, partly because the author has a much more distinctive presence in these contemporary settings that still manage to channel Nick & Carter’s world. I am not sure if someone who has not read a significant part of the Nick Williams series will be confused or not by this series, which is both entirely independent and completely interconnected.

So, the twist here is that Whit and Eddie have in essence become Nick and Carter. They now are in control of WilliamsJones, and thus are gay billionaires. As with any billionaire, there are complications in their life, including constant security (meaning actual guys, who at least in this case are gay guys), and constant surveillance (very Big Brother, except that you own Big Brother).

Thus, while this zaftig gentle bear of a man, Eddie Smith, and Whit Hall, a massive muscled giant of a football player, have each come into their own and have embraced their shared life as the new Nick and Carter, things are not all smooth. Adding to this—and I loved this—is that COVID 19 is here, and the shared reality in which we are all trapped right now is part of this story.

When an important cog in the corporate world that Whit and Eddie are building in Daytona Beach is found murdered in his office, the hunt is on. This is entirely parallel to the mysteries that Nick & Carter had to unravel back in the 1950s; but this is all spun out with a very distinctly contemporary view of the world, and that’s entirely right. Nick & Carter were sort of gay superheroes, and Butterfield took great pains to show us their vulnerabilities, those things that even their vast fortune could not solve. Whit & Eddie, on the other hand, are very much modern, flawed men, with human frailties that are all the more intense for being familiar to both the author and to contemporary readers.

Here I have to confess that I read this, feeling slightly out of sync, and then realized that I’d missed book 5 in this series, which went into my Kindle storage rather than onto my Kindle reading list…so I seem to have missed some significant plot points! But, you know, it didn’t make much difference. The murder mystery that Whit and Eddie get dragged into is the key, giving Butterfield’s fans a chance to look inside the quirky, big-hearted, wounded men to see what makes them tick. I’ll tell you all about book 5 when I get to it.