The Secret Tunnel

Be forwarded I have gone and picked up a racy novel again, so if your faint of heart don’t read on. Ha!

After an Agatha break it is onto the latest James Lear novel. As I am doing a feature on him this has arrived as a delightfully early advance copy from Cleis Press and the man behind James Lear (no pun intended) Rupert Smith so I thank them both most kindly. Now if you have read my previous blog you will know that James Lear writes erotic fiction mixed with a good slice of crime, well at least for the Mitch Mitchell books, and this is the second. You will also know that bar Anais Nin I have always pooh-poohed erotica as being trash, James Lear proved me wrong and he has succeeded in doing so again.

The Secret Tunnel is set roughly a year or so down the line from The Back Passage. Mitch Mitchell has moved to Edinburgh and is going on the Flying Scotsman to visit his best friend and married ‘on off’ lover Boy Morgan in London. Mitch doesn’t enjoy travelling alone finding that he gets bored, however on this journey he won’t - and not just from the attractive staff and passengers. Of course not long into the journey someone gets murdered and Mitch sees it as his chance to play at detective again, what he believes is his true vocation.

Naturally with a James Lear novel there is heaps of sex, again following his ‘an orgasm a chapter minimal’ rule of thumb. Again this is part of the story not just an add-on for thrills though some of it is indeed thrilling. The sex takes you along with the plot and becomes and integral part of the whole novel. We also get to meet a whole new host of characters like dizzy starlet Daisy Athenasy and stowaway and Mitch’s new sidekick Bertrand from Belgium.

If your thinking all the action takes place on the Flying Scotsman then you would be wrong as we are taken into the decadence of 30’s/40’s London where the motley crew of investigators get taken on even more thrills and spills through royal connections and the theatre lovelies. The whole novel ends far too quickly in a very climatic twist. I once again really enjoyed this James Lear novel and would recommend it to fans of crime as well as fans of all things fruity.