Cannonball Read V- Book 1: Personal Demons by James Buchanan

My first exposure to James Buchanan was The Good Thief.  It was one of the first M/Ms I read when I started buying them for my Nook.  In preparation for Cannonball Read V, I picked up a few more of by the same author and was not disappointed.

Personal Demons had a lot of what I enjoy in an m/m romance-thriller; cops, FBI, hot men who aren't out at their jobs; men who meet and fuck and then find out later that they have to work together; no huge fight, but instead personal issues (or, I guess demons, if you will) that make it difficult for the heroes to be together.  That makes it sound so simple, but it wasn't, which I appreciated the most.

Truthfully, what I appreciate the most about James Buchanan's work is the amount of world building (informing?) that goes on.  I have no clue what it's like in LA, but there are enough sense details to let me envision it.  I know little about the world of Voodoo and Santeria, but she did a great job of explaining differences and then, again, giving those details that made me feel that I wasn't a complete moron as I read.

The two main characters, Chase and Enrique, were hot together.  Neither of them were out in their respective jobs, but they weren't ashamed of being gay.  Enrique's - the LA cop - had his life more together than Chase's by far, but he wasn't overly full of himself.  He knew that his religious and sexual orientation could be a problem for the department, but it didn't make him self-loathing.  Chase, the FBI agent and protagonist, had a drinking problem, which he acknowledged, and that was the holding him back from a relationship more than being gay.  Both of them were fully developed characters, with clear external and internal motivations, without ever making me feel like Buchanan was beating me over the head to understand them.

I'm fairly simple when it comes to what I enjoy: hot men and happy endings.  I got both of those in this.