Today I want to claim a merit to me, the fact to have called for the first time the two on going series by Carol Lynne, Campus Cravings and Cattle Valley, 'gay soap opera'. After two or three books per each series, they started to remind me a soap opera, with all the characters mixed together, with all the unbelievable events a mind could possible imagine, happening in small town barely able to have a diner, a theatre and a school. But despite the territorial limitation, in Cattle Valley, and its twin small college community that hosts Campus Cravings, you can find former professional football player, Olympic gold medals, wealthy men, war heroes, rodeo champions... try to imagine a dream lover and you are sure to find it in Cattle Valley, the paradise for every gay man.

In this last novel, we have not one, but two stories mixed together: Chad and Richard, respectively the hotel manager and the bar manager of the new mountain lodge which will be inaugurated on New Year's Eve, who spend all their free time arguing and launching lustful gaze to each other, and Collin and Abe, the shyest man on Cattle Valley and the former top-model turned lonely bear in a mountain isolated cabin.

Richard is an old acquaintance for the readers, the man Ezra and Wyn saved from a abusive Master in Oklahoma. Despite his stud body, Richard is a romantic at heart and a submissive for nature. He would do everything for the man he loves, but he learned that dying is a bit extreme. And so now he is wary when coming to love. Chad instead has the classical Napoleon complex: small in height but with a bigger than ever will, he learned that a full frontal attack sometime saves him from the necessity to prove his physical strenght; he reminds me a Chiuaua that wants to control a Danese.

Collin instead suffers from the middle son complex: his big brother was the sport star, his little sister the genius, and Collin was only the good boy, the one to whom everyone smiles to soon after looks up to one of his siblings. He has a lingering crush on Abe, a man who lives in an isolated cabin in the mountain, but even if Abe is not the socialite of the city, Collin thinks neither him could be interested in the shy man he is. On the other hand Abe has chosen a self inflicted isolation, almost a prison to make amends for an horrible sin in his past, and how can a good man like Collin being interested in him? A snow storm that strands Collin to Abe's cabin will help the two to see how much they have in common and how much they were mistaken about each other desires.

As often in the series, there is no drama, no angst (maybe a little in Abe and Richard's past history), a lot of sex and an obviosly and unavoidable happily ever after: if not like this, the reader will now in the next chapter on the soap opera how its charaters are behaving!

http://www.amazon.com/dp/1907010858/?tag=elimyrevandra-20