tl;dr: fast-paced sexy thriller that keeps you guessing

The story:

Some books, you need to just hold on to your hat and go in for the ride. This is such a book. Every twist and turn I kept chortling and saying “this is nuts!” but I couldn’t stop reading. I was 100% sucked in to this story, and devoured it with near obsession.

The story begins with our main character, having suffered a traumatic experience at her 18th birthday party, now the hostage of some shadowy figure who is apparently incredibly skilled at carving up animals for dinner. He stinks of sex appeal, and this woman is torn between a desire to keep her senses intact and to jump him. She keeps waffling about whether she’s suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, plotting her escape.

Light spoiler: This is one of the best examples of an unreliable narrator I’ve ever seen. She has amnesia! She doesn’t recall her life! The twists kept piling on and on, and I was whipped into a frenzy of desperately needing to know how the story ends.

Julian’s motivation’s sometimes seem a little convenient, as to why he makes the decisions he does, and the whole warring families/companies could have used more explanation.

Technical elements:

The author liberally uses short half-sentences in order to build suspense. While I generally don’t have an issue with it, when used well, the sheer overabundance of this device got tiresome.

The flashbacks to the birthday party were as clear as they could be, using timestamps. When I needed to orient myself in the timeline, I just had to flip back and see the timestamps for the previous flashback. It’s really hard to go back in time and make it a seamless experience for the reader.

Final thoughts:

I hesitate to classify this as a so-called ‘trashy’ romance, although it has a lot of the qualities that one might deem it so. There’s not a lot of navel-gazing here, the plot moves quickly and has more twists than a soap opera. (Oh, and the sex is hot.) But the story is smart, and I think that speaks for itself. I was completely and totally immersed in this world and I really, really enjoyed it.