Review: The Prince

tl;dr: soul-shattering bliss that’ll have you begging “merci”


The story:

The Prince picks up where The Angel left off, picking you back up before throwing you to the ground again. Repeatedly. I find it so difficult to review books that have given me so many Feels(tm) and wrecked me, but in a way that has me begging for more. (Tiffany Reisz is as sadistic as her priest.) So, I’ll try my best.

The narrative is split between two stories; Kingsley and Soren as an erotic sleuthing team going into the past of their childhood at St Ignatius, the Jesuit private school where they met, and Nora and Wesley in Kentucky, the land of horse-racing and money. What links the stories together is the underlying threat that was introduced in The Angel: the mysterious thief who stole Nora’s file from Kingsley’s office.

Wesley and Kingsley are really the focus of this book, in their individual plots. Nora does have her own arc, but it’s small. Wesley is growing up into a man, and learning what it really means to love Nora. And Kingsley is having to fight between the two loves of his life, the ghost of his sister and his love for a man he isn’t supposed to have.

Technical elements:

As always, Reisz is a master of the phrase.

“God… Nora,” was all he could gasp. He had no other words. God and Nora. They became the same person at that moment. He worshipped at the altar of her body and for a moment he felt the power of their union as a communion.”

“Sadist. They left their notches no on their lovers’ bedposts but on the very bodies of those who braved their beds.”

The narrative flips around from North, Past and Present, and South, where our protagonists are scattered across place and time. Sometimes when reading a book that essentially is two or more stories, where the plots run parallel for a time, I am more heavily invested in one over the other, and put up with the lesser to get to the one that really grips me. But with this one, both threads are captivating, battling for dominance (pun intended), and it’s hard to say which wins, if any.

Final thoughts:

Evil, evil cliffhanger.

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