The Delve is what I imagine reading a D&D campaign would be like. A noble knight, his staff-wielding squire/lover, and a mage are sent on a mission to a distant mine that has gone silent to discover what happened. There they are joined by a local to navigate the labyrinthine mines and rescue the survivors.

While the book is a standalone, it is set in the same world as the author’s previous works, and it is fairly obvious that I was missing out on a lot of context having never read any of his other books. There wasn’t much worldbuilding outside of what we needed to know about the mine, and even the characters’ races were vague (the three MCs are called Maers which I thought were Chewbacca-like creatures while the locals were what I thought to be dwarves). It felt like I was dropped into an RPG game with just the briefest of briefings right before. Then the rest of the book is one action sequence after another, fighting different creatures interspersed by a lot of going up and down ladders and shafts and some fairly graphic sex scenes. If that sounds like something you would be into, then this book is for you. I mostly found that this subgenre may mot be for me as I needed more depth in both plot and characters.

I did like the characters even if they were essentially just queerer versions of archetypes. These characters were almost hilariously horny for each other, and there are descriptive couplings of every permutation of binary gender from straight to gay to lesbian sex scenes with some light bondage thrown in. I did not dislike it as I thought the spice added much needed variety to the story.

The Delve is an almost LitRPG fantasy that is action-packed, queer, and with quite a bit of spice.

*I received an ebook as part of a book tour for it.