Blog Tour and Review: Heidi Belleau's Straight Shooter!

Hello hello! I’m Heidi Belleau, and welcome to the Riptide Books “Straight Shooter” blog tour! Straight Shooter is the third (and final?) novel in my Rear Entrance Video series, and is the story of roommate Austin, a homophobic hockey player with a kinky secret . . . and the Dominant porn star who helps him get his act together. For the next two weeks, I’ll be hopping blog to blog giving you an inside look at the novel . . . and also giving away a prize! Read on for details! Thanks to The Saucy Wenches Book Club and to all of you for tuning in!

(Follow us through the jump for an interview with Ms Belleau, a giveaway, and a review of Straight Shooter!)

1) Introduce yourself! It's great to 'see' you here at The Saucy Wenches Book Club, Ms Belleau, tell us a little about yourself!

Well, just off the bat, here’s a thing you may not know: I get a little squirm of pleasure when I get called “Ms. Belleau.” Especially since in my head I hear it like Mizz. Oh yes. But what else? I’m married to an Irishman, I live in Northern Canada, and I love to write dirty talk.

2) What brings you here? Out of sheer curiosity, what prompted the Rear Entrance Video series?

I wanted to write a comedic contemporary series, but I wanted it to be something a little different. I worked for a year or so in a porn store in college, so I decided to mine that experience for a funny, sexy series. And thus, Rear Entrance Video was born!

3) What do YOU like to read? Left to your own devices, what would you pick up?

I love erotic romance. I’ve been on a long M/M kick but I’m getting into reading some F/F and M/F again now. Anything with great lead characters and lots of smartly written smut.

4) What is your favorite book?

Anything of Sherman Alexie’s books could compete. In my own genre, I loved Scrap Metal by Harper Fox just on a prose level, and for sex, I can’t give enough praise to the Shivaree series by Cara McKenna.

5) What's the number one question you wish people would ask you in these interviews - and, of course, what is the answer?

What’s your favourite scene from your upcoming book?” And for Straight Shooter, that would be any scene where Liam and Austin are sharing screen time and Liam is needling Austin. It was just so fun to make Austin squirm!

6) Now, many of us have an author whose work, it doesn't matter what they've written, but when they release something new, we automatically buy it - without even thinking twice about it. Do you have any authors on your auto-buy list?

Yes! Lisa Henry is my #1 autobuy. She writes great kink and a lot of themes I really enjoy. I never finish a book of hers dissatisfied.

7) Your release of Straight Shooter is coming up quickly! Tell us a little about it!

Well, I’ve been calling it “my hockey player BDSM GFY book with humiliation kink”! Basically, take one aggressively straight homophobic hockey player, add in a kink for humiliation and emasculation, stir in a male dom, and then let it bake until they’re falling in love despite their best intentions.

About Straight Shooter
This macho jock has a crooked little secret.
College hockey player Austin Puett is in trouble. Unless he starts treating his flamboyantly gay roommate with respect, he’ll lose his room and his job at Rear Entrance Video. But Austin’s got a not-so-straight secret of his own: nothing turns him on more than insults implying he’s gay—even though he’s definitely not!—and all his old coping methods have stopped working. Pure desperation drives him to rent a Mischievous Pictures porn flick about straight men tricked into servicing Puck, a male dominant. Instead of letting off steam, though, it just leaves him craving more, more, more, and suddenly, Austin finds himself at Mischievous Pictures Studios for an audition. After all, you can be Gay For Pay and still be straight . . . right? But meeting Liam Williams, the real person behind Puck, confuses Austin even more. Liam really seems to like him as a person, and Austin likes him back. And while Gay For Pay’s okay, what does it make Austin if he still wants Liam when the cameras aren’t rolling?

About the Author
Heidi Belleau was born and raised in small town New Brunswick, Canada. She now lives in the rugged oil-patch frontier of Northern BC with her husband, an Irish ex-pat whose long work hours in the trades leave her plenty of quiet time to write. She has a degree in history from Simon Fraser University with a concentration in British and Irish studies; much of her work centered on popular culture, oral folklore, and sexuality, but she was known to perplex her professors with papers on the historical roots of modern romance novel tropes. (Ask her about Highlanders!) Her writing reflects everything she loves: diverse casts of characters, a sense of history and place, equal parts witty and filthy dialogue, the occasional mythological twist, and most of all, love—in all its weird and wonderful forms. She also writes queer-flavoured M/F as Heloise Belleau. Chat with her on twitter using the handle @HeidiBelleau.
Browse her website at HeidiBelleau.com or HeloiseBelleau.com.
Check out her books on Goodreads.
Follow her Facebook and Tumblr accounts.
Or contact her using good ole-fashioned email: heidi.heloise.belleau @ gmail.com


Comment to win! I’m giving away ebooks one and two of the Rear Entrance Video series (that’s “Apple Polisher” and “Wallflower”) to not one, but two lucky commenters on this tour! All you gotta do is leave a comment on this post with a way to contact you (and if your preferred method of contact is email, make sure to put that in the body of the comment, not just in the blog’s form—I can’t see that info! Each comment counts for another entry in the draw, so be sure and follow the entire tour. Entries close at midnight, Eastern Time, on April 21, and winners will be chosen on April 23rd. Contest is valid worldwide.

 And now, on to the review!
I had the opportunity to read all three of the Rear Entrance Video books back to back.  I have to say I was a little leery coming into Straight Shooter after having read Apple Polisher and Wallflower.  Austin, the lead for Straight Shooter, is both the most likable and the least likable character in the series for me - he was the generally happy, seemingly well-adjusted, nice guy jock (who has a bit of a case of 'duh,' but we can't win 'em all!)... who also was more and more against his roommates turning the house into the self-appointed Gayest House In Vancouver.  Austin did not handle Max and Christian being gay, AND Rob being actually gender-queer Bobby particularly well, and it automatically made me suspicious of him.  Ms Belleau's summary above is pretty much what I'd call it - very gay-for-you, and Austin... well, it turns out Austin has a few little secrets of his own.  

I didn't expect to like Austin as much as I did. I expected to be a little lackluster on the whole thing, because... Well... It's Austin.  And Austin, between his grudge and his not-too-brights, was exactly NOT my cup of tea.  Liam, however... Liam was exactly what this book needed.  Liam was patient where I'd have strangled Austin, he was kind, he was hot as hell...  You know how it goes.  The two of them together make a story that had the potential to be moderate-to-okay into a story that was really excellent.  I enjoyed every minute of the story, of Austin's... well, honestly, his reformation-or-else.  Austin turned out to be more worried and nervous than anything else, thus making the potential for his being an absolute jerk and absolutely horrifying into something completely different, and absolutely worth the read.  Granted, I preferred Liam, but really, who doesn't have a favorite?  You really do need to read this book. 

Wench Rating:

What do you think, readers? Have you read any of the Rear Entrance Video series? What did you think? Who do you love, and are you looking forward to Austin's story?