Title Tea with the Black Dragon Author R.A. MacAvoy Cover Art Pauline Ellison Publisher Bantam Books - 1985 First Printing Bantam Books - 1983
	Title Twisting the Rope Author R.A. MacAvoy Cover Art --- Publisher e-reads books - 1999 First Printing 1986
	Category Urban Fantasy Warnings None Main Characters Mayland Long, Martha Macnamara, Padraig, George, Teddy, Elen, Marty Main Elements Dragons Website ramacavoy.com

Tea with the Black Dragon

Twisting the Rope

I found a gorgeous older copy of Tea with the Black Dragon in a used bookstore. The lady who owned it congratulated me on my find of this fantasy classic. I don't remember where I had first heard of it but I was very happy with my find as well.

Now it is a short book, only 166 pages, so I thought I would get through it in a couple days. But I was wrong. There was something about it that just made you slow down and savour it, though I can't say what it was. It was intriguing, Mayland Long, who apparently is actually an ancient asian dragon...or maybe just an unusual human with a few physical quirks and quite a few personality eccentricities. And Martha Macnamara, a wandering soul, a musician, who attracts Long's attention because she sees the world differently from everyone else and may hold the key to what he's been seeking all these years.

Throw in some computer technology, a kinapping mystery to solve, and it was a very odd, but very well done blend.

And so I was very eager to read Twisting the Rope, but it didn't have the same kind of magic the first one did. I had to work a bit harder to care about the characters, not that the story was boring, and the mystery was indeed as twisted as the title grass rope, but it just didn't hold up to the first. And the fact that Long is a dragon is pretty well irrelevant. However there is another very strange and at times creepy supernatural flavour to the tale.

So I highly recommend the first, and if you like it, continue with the second simply because Long is such a fascinating character, viewing our world through the eyes of something entirely alien to us yet striving to understand.