As I have said before my blog is not a book review site. Because of the rather small community of editors and writers I do think it is a conflict of interest to pretend to be objective concerning an industry that I participate in. That means when I discuss a book it is because I liked it and I thought it delivered well on some aspect and such is the case with Poison or Protect a romantic novella set in the Parasol Protectorate setting by Gail Carriger. (Full disclosure Gail has been a friend for many years but that is not why I am here to praise her work with this piece.)

Poison or Protect  concerns a mountain of a man Gavin, a retired military man, a Scot, whose has been dispatched to protect a politician from a potential assassination who suddenly finds himself overwhelmingly attracted to Preshea a woman who has left such a trail of dead husbands in her wake that she has been dubbed ‘The Mourning Star’ and who may be the very assassin. Preshea has been sent to the country house by other political powers with additional agendas and finds herself off balanced by the impressive Scotsman. This is a lighthearted roman with serious emotional undertones and more than one Hard R rated sex scene. The humor fires on all cylinders with engaging and memorable characters but I want to focus on the sex scenes.

I am one of those writers that tends to close the discreetly on my character’s sexual adventures but that is not from prudishness but rather my philosophy about writing in general. A scene should do one or more things, further plot, reveal character, establish mood or perform world-building, and ideally a scene does several of these things at once and most sex scenes are usually just that, the characters having their fun. What Gail performs admirably in this novella is that not only do the sex scenes reveal essential character elements for both Gavin and Preshea, the exact nature of the sex, the advances and retreats all give us a much fuller understanding of the characters than any other scene could have hoped to achieve. Not only does her sex scenes reveal character it is very difficult to imagine a more elegant way to reveal these very aspect, making Gail’s sex scenes critical elements that are unable to be excised from the text without destroying the fabric of the tale. The sex scenes are not ‘fan service’ but rather the emotional heart of the story and a perfect example of how to craft character illuminative sequences.