Bayou Dreams (Rougaroux Social Club #1), by Lynn Lorenz

Sheriff Scott Dupree’s
got more problems than he can handle. He’s alpha of his small werewolf
pack and coming up for re-election as sheriff in a year. On top of this,
his mother is casting love spells to find Scott a mate. It’s all Scott
can do to keep the town and pack under control, let alone his urges to
mate.

Ted Canedo is openly gay, a disgraced ex-cop from New
Orleans. His patrol partner was killed on duty and Ted took the blame
for taking protection money from the store owner to save his partner’s
wife and kids grief. No one knew Ted was in love with his partner, not
even his partner. Having him die in Ted’s arms killed something inside
Ted too.

When the moon is full and Scott’s momma works her magic,
Ted’s erotic dreams and his work as a PI bring him to St. Jerome and
sexy, straight Scott. Scott’s stunned to learn his wolf is gay and wants
to mate with Ted. Ted refuses to become involved with a straight man,
much less a werewolf, terrified to risk his heart again.

Especially if it he has to watch Scott fight to the death for his right to claim Ted as his mate. 

Rating: 4 out of 5

I’ll start off here with a bit of a rant. Keeping in mind that the target audience for M/M romances is straight women, the views presented in the genre can sometimes be…distorted. One of the common tropes is “gay for you” (or GFY in the fan parlance). This trope is, “I have been straight all of my life but now that I have met this particular man I am madly in love.” This gets under my skin because it completely ignores the existence of bisexuality and the fact that sexual orientation is a continuum, not a discrete, binary gay/straight thing. Typically not even a nod is given to the possibility of bisexuality which is annoying at best and outright offensive at worst.

There. Having gotten that off my chest I can get on with this review, which ostensibly does fall under the GFY trope, but it skirts around it neatly. The idea presented here is that a werewolf has a human side and a wolf side. The human may be whatever orientation, but the wolf wants what the wolf wants (male or female), and it’s going to get it. This sets up an interesting tension between the characters that was, to be honest, pretty damn hot.

Having gone to school in New Orleans, I’m a sucker for stories set in Louisiana. Werewolf stories in Louisiana? I’m all about that! The characters of Ted and Scott are interesting and their angst at the undeniable draw between them makes for a good story. The rural countryside and swamps provide atmosphere for a fun, fast-paced story.

Unfortunately, in places things didn’t flow quite as smoothly as they could have. The introduction of some characters that are clearly present for future books in the series is a little clunky. Also, I generally give wide leeway for how sex scenes are written. Everyone has something that turns their crank, even if it doesn’t do much for me. Even so, the sex scenes didn’t always quite read as well as I would have liked. This may be just a personal thing, though.

I liked this book a lot and have already bought the next one in the series!

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