Category: Fiction

I literally said, “Oh yeah!” out loud when I got to the first chapter of this book, which came after a very brief prologue. It read Alistair at the top of the page, so I was excited about coming up with the correct prediction regarding the main character, and equally elated that there was going to be an entire book about him. I first got the feeling when Jonas mentions watching his brother watching a blue haired girl at the art gala near the end of Oaths and Omissions. I think I knew then that the mayor’s story would be up and coming. 

Arrows and Apologies takes place at about the same time as Oaths and Omissions, you will see the overlap where this story begins and the art gala from the previous book. So while Jonas is in the middle of his arrangement with Lenny, Alistair is trying to figure out why he is so enamored with this stranger he met once in Boston. Cora, our main lady, is on a mission to find a missing person and her search leads her to Aplana Island. She had no idea that the man she encountered one time in an alley on the mainland was the mayor of the island town she was led towards in her search. Now she finds herself face to face with the possessive, slightly irritating,  and dangerous man everyday while she vigilantly pursues any and all leads to finding the person she has been looking for over the past year. 

There is a lot more mystery involved in this story than the others, the reader is not privy to all, or most, of the information. You are actually trying to find out what happened to the missing person as we do not get a first person point of view from them. There is one shifty character, which is normal for this series, and the entire time you are trying to figure out what his angle is and where his loyalties truly lie. Also, he’s kind of a huge jerk, I disliked him every time he appeared on the page. We get introduced to what I believe is the big, majority ruling crime family that is a backbone behind all the crime in the entire series. The amount of power they hold makes the power that we have seen from Kallum, Jonas, and now Alistair, less so in comparison. Alistair doesn’t quite seem scared of them, just worried. But for a man like him, a man who seems to rarely be bothered by anything, this is a cause for concern. I wonder if we will get a deeper view into the organization in the remaining two books. 

The next book, number five, I accidentally got a preview of as I was finishing up this one. An excerpt from the next book followed the epilogue of this one, and it was on the same page and my eyes strayed. I usually enjoy the surprise of discovering who our next characters will be when I open up the next book, but when I saw who it was I exclaimed, “Ooooo” a little loudly. I won’t say who I saw, but I did see them coming. And I do intend that ‘them’ to be read as plural.

I don’t want to speak too soon, but I think this might be my favorite book in the Monsters and Muses series. It outshone the first two in that I loved the story, the couple suited each other well from the start, and my least favorite trope was omitted! And I got my wish, a book focused on Jonas. There are minor spoilers ahead. 

Our leading man, part bar owner, part hitman, wants revenge. He wants to finish a job he started over a decade ago involving a botched hit on a man who played a part in the death of his father. Jonas ends up serving jail time due to his errors but for a much shorter period of time than he should have. We get his origin story here, how he became who he is and how he met and started working with Kallum. After being introduced to him in Promises and Pomegranates and being very intrigued I am very satisfied in getting to know all about him. It’s been said that due to an overwhelming desire for readers of the series to get more Kallum and Elena the author was motivated to write a prequel to their story. But I want more Jonas and Lenny!

Lenny is the only daughter of a well to do and well known family that lives on Aplana island, the same island where Kallum, Elena, and Jonas live. Similar to Elena, Lenny has lived her entire life according to her parents wishes, perhaps in an even more restrictive sense than the daughter of a mafia leader. Having been exploited since she was born, her parents have always found a way to use Lenny to boost and promote her fathers business. You will notice that there are a lot of similarities between the two women. But in my case I ended up feeling much more sorry for Lenny while at the same time feeling a lot more distaste for her mother and father. She finally gets out from under her parents’ very large thumbs when she decides to start a fake relationship with Jonas after a chance encounter. 

We get a lot of new characters here, which I found very welcoming after the small cast in Vipers and Virtuosus. I think the large cast made the story all the more interesting and the conflict all the more provocative. I hope that the next three books follow this formula. And with three books to go, I think I may want to change my predictions about who might be the focus. I previously stated that I could see each of Elena’s sisters getting a book, but I think things are going in another direction. I got a feeling that the end of Oaths and Omissions was kind of hinting at the next book, which I think could star Jonas’ brother, Alistair. I am less certain that we will get a book on Blue, the bouncer and sometimes fill in bartender at The Flaming Chariot, as there wasn’t much mention of him in this book. Instead, I could maybe see one of Lenny’s older brothers getting a book. I would really enjoy a story focused on Cash, the polished lawyer who works in Boston. And I won’t spoil the ending, but a character from the previous book was briefly on page, making me think that we will get a King’s Trace romance. I am literally going to grab the next book in mere minutes, as soon as I finish typing the last few words of this review and have looked it all over. I won’t have time to post another bonus review this Friday, I will be going on a quick weekend getaway, but hopefully by next week you may have caught up to me if you have started the series and you’ll be ready to see what I have to say next. 

Surprise! It has been a while since I had a bonus Friday blog post. You will probably be getting a few of them this month because I am blowing through this series.

To pick up where I left off, I was right and I love it when I am right! Book two in the Monsters and Muses series was indeed focused on Riley. Little did we know, when the Ricci sisters were gossiping about the disgraced rock star at the diner in Promises and Pomegranates, that we were actually getting a glimpse of the scandal that makes up the plot of the following book. I did not see that coming, but I am pleased with the little piece of information that set up the story for Vipers and Virtuosos. 

As much as I liked the story and the characters, I was unfortunately once again faced with my least favorite trope, the virgin. The untouched female in this story was slightly more believable in terms of her character, as she was very unsure and skittish. This made me willing to look past the ick I usually get when I realize the story I’m reading is about a virgin discovering the delights of sex. There are some places in the story where I believe that Riley should have been a little bit more unwilling and afraid when you take into account the events of her past. I won’t spoil that for you, I’ll let you discover it for yourself. I will only say that she experienced an incredibly traumatic event when she was sixteen, and when the events of this story take place it has only been two years since the incident. In my opinion, the horrible experience she went through and the time that had passed since, along with her very young age, would not allow her to be ready to be ready for the type of intimacy that Aiden exposed her to.

We get to see a little bit of Kallum in this story, he is assisting Riley on her journey but I won’t say how. Other than that we pretty much get all new characters. We get to delve a little bit  into the world from which Kallum came. So if you were curious about Kallum’s origins, or you just wanted more of him, you get a little bit of his backstory here. Ivers International, the security organization he used to work full time for, is now headed by its namesake Kieran Ivers. Riley’s older brother, Boyd, works at Ivers and is one of the best at what he does for the association. 

I think based on the plot of this book we can expect to learn more about Ivers International and the men, and perhaps women, who work there, in future books. At the end of this book, Riley is back In King’s Trace, the town she hailed from, and I feel like more is going to happen there. Perhaps the next book will be about Boyd and Fiona? I was hoping for a book focused on Jonas or Blue, and I can see one or both of Elena’s sisters getting a book as well. There are four more books in this series, so maybe I will be correct on most of these predictions. I am most eager to learn more about the mysterious Blue, the bouncer from Jonas and Kallum bar in Aplana. You’ll see another review from me on Thursday next week. 

I can see why the author wrote a prequel for Promises and Pomegranates because you do want to find out more about how the physical relationship between Kallum and Elena began once you start the story. But if you were like me and read the prequel first, Sweet Sin does make you want to invest in that book as is evidenced by me having done just that. That being said, I am glad that I did it backwards in having read the subsequently written prequel first. The end of Sweet Sin makes more sense once you start to read Promises and Pomegranates, it becomes clear that Elena was attacked by Mateo and not a victim of a kidnapping just then. Considering that the affianced pair have a history of beating each other, it’s clear that Mateo attacked her and she blacked out from that. 

As for what I thought of the book overall, it was pretty high on my personal scale regarding the spice, so I did like it for that. I did have one thing that made me not enjoy it as much as I think I could have. My big ick in the world of tropes is virginity. Something about mixing virginity with dark romance, and some additional genres, just annoys and irritates me. I find that it makes the story less believable if the main character is a virgin who ends up being immediately very open to anything and everything, isn’t shy or unsure, and is the most amazing sexual partner that the other person has ever been with. No one is that good at anything their first try, that is not how it works. I know it’s fiction, but it just doesn’t ever feel even a little bit convincing to me. Elena happens to tick pretty much all of my boxes for the ick. One she is a virgin who is embarrassingly desperate to lose her virginity to Kallum. During their first encounter she has what in my opinion is entirely too much vigor for someone who is being penetrated for the first time, and doesn’t seem to suffer from the pain and muscle soreness that usually follows the act. In fact, they go back to back to back. The only believable part of this, in my opinion, was that after their last round she immediately fell asleep. All of the above mentioned occurred in Sweet Sin, but the irritation continues in Promises and Pomegranates. Elena has been yearning for Kallum ever since the night they had together which was followed with his disappearance. I have a feeling that if he didn’t return then she would have gone years pining after him before finally giving up and moving on. And in my imagination avoiding being intimate with anyone would have fallen under this desperation of waiting to see if the man would come back to her. There is an abhorrently cringe worthy moment in the book when she refers to herself as the ‘virgin archetype’ in which I actually groaned aloud at. So while I was interested in the story and I did enjoy the spice, in the back of my mind I was always thinking about my least favorite, most hated, trope. 

Having gone into this series almost blind, I am very curious about the plot of the next book. Do we get more of Kallum and Elena, or does the story focus around another couple? I have a feeling that we have seen the end of Hades and his Persephone and that we will get an entirely new story in book two. I have a feeling that the next book will be a romance between the very briefly mentioned Riley and a new character. Or I could be very wrong and the next book in this series follows characters that have absolutely no relation to anyone from Promises and Pomegranates. I am eager to finish writing this review so that I can find out. If I wasn’t so adamant about writing a review for a finished book before I start a new book then I would have begun Vipers and Virtuosos already. So, I will be abruptly ending my blog here.

Unrelated, I really liked the way the last picture I took turned out. Seeing as this is the book that the prequel was based off of, I decided to just do the exact same thing. I think it looks just as good and this makes me feel pretty pleased with myself! Also, when I was taking the picture for Sweet Sin it was before I had even opened the book. I had no idea that there would be actual black ribbon involved, that was just a happy coincidence.

This is pure filth, all sixty eight pages of it. Honestly, I didn’t even need to really bother marking where the spice is, the entire novella is spice. If you have a free thirty minutes and want to read a dirty story, this is it. Besides that, I don’t have much to say. It is a prequel to the six book Monster and Muses series, a little something extra the author wrote for the fans after the masses expressed that they wanted more. I went in completely blind with this, I had no idea what these books were about. I feel like after having read this prequel that I still do not know what I am about to venture into.

I’m wondering if I should have saved this novella for after I read the series, maybe the end would have made a little more sense. I’m not sure if it was alluding to Elena being killed and reincarnated, which seems kind of likely with how much the author mentions Hades and Persephone, or if Elena just gets kidnapped a lot. Maybe it will be a little more clear in a few days as I am starting the first book in the series, Promises and Pomegranates. I hope to have a lot more to report in my next post!