Tag Archives: mafia

underground kings covers

Book Review: Underground Kings #1-3, by Jenika Snow

underground kings covers

I’ve had Cold Hearted Bastard, Reckless Heirand Corruption long enough that I’m no longer 100% sure where they all came from. Mostly, I’m uncertain where I got Cold-Hearted Bastard. Perhaps I purchased it at the same time I bought Reckless Heir and Corruption from the author. But I don’t know why I would have bought it as an ebook and the other one as a paperback. So, I suspect I already had the e-copy of Cold Hearted Bastard, and that’s why I chose to buy books two and three in The Underworld Kings series when I saw that Jenika Snow had signed books available in her shop and bought a couple.

Regardless, I’m trying to make a concerted effort to read some of the paperbacks that have such a tendency to get put on the shelf (out of sight, out of mind), which is why I’m reading these at long last.


cold hearted bastard photoAbout Cold Hearted Bastard:

He didn’t have a heart… but he wanted hers.

All I knew about life was anger and violence. Pain and suffering. Kill or be killed.

I was a “fixer” for the Ruin—a syndicate for the Bratva, Cosa Nostra, Cartel, and any other organized crime faction that dealt in the darker, crueler aspects of humanity.

I was a free agent who was called upon to do things weaker men didn’t have the stomach for.

And when you surround yourself with death for long enough, soon, you didn’t remember what it felt like to be alive.

And then I saw her. She was a fragile little thing who tried to be strong. But I could tell she’d seen too much horror in the world, too much of the ugly within people. I should have stayed away. I’d only bring her farther down into the darkness.

But for the first time in my life, I felt a stirring in my chest, this protectiveness and possessiveness toward another living person. And it was painful. It made me feel alive.

Lina tried to hide how broken she was, but I was an old friend of being ruined. She held secrets I’d find out. Because for the first time in my miserable life, I wanted something for myself. I felt something more than apathy and indifference.

I wanted to possess the innocence she clung to. I wanted to break it open and consume it for myself.

I could look into her too trusting blue eyes and knew I’d maim for her. I’d kill for her. And that became our truth when her past finally came back for her when my present tried to destroy her.

They thought they could take the one thing—the only thing—I’d ever wanted for myself. They were wrong.

When I looked at her, I felt some of the monster that made me who I retreated back to my black soul. He’d never leave… but he’d share the space.

For her.

my review
Meh. The writing and editing were fine. The spicy scenes were spicy, and the book isn’t lousy with them. But if you’ve read my reviews for a while, you’ve probably seen me call something the low-hanging fruit of plotting. That’s what I call books whose primary plot hinges on bad men sexually abusing women. It’s not that I’m screaming trigger warnings or feminism. There is no moral outrage here. I’m not saying such things shouldn’t get written. It’s just that it’s been written so often and regularly that it’s cliched by now. I read such books and basically visualize a lazy author not wanting to work too hard, so they reach for the low-hanging fruit, the story that is all but a cultural narrative by now. There’s no creativity, nothing original or new. It’s old, tired, overused, and boring at this point.

If you happen to like the kind of thing, good for you. You’ll probably love this book. I cannot express my disappointment that Snow didn’t stretch her creative muscles even a little bit to write this book. Personally, I’m tired of seeing our victimhood trotted out as entertainment with nothing more to accompany it in a book. As if he’s a rapist or a trafficker and she’s a rape survivor or escaping trafficking is character development and plot by itself. It is not. Do more.


Reckless heir photoAbout Reckless Heir:

My father sold me off to a ruthless killer in the Russian mafia, an alliance between the Bratva and the Cosa Nostra.

An arranged marriage where I’d be at the mercy of the man who’d no doubt see me as his property, where I was sure he’d be just as cruel and violent as every other Made Man I’d known in my life.

Nikolai Petrov, known to be a sociopath and for killing anyone for the smallest infraction. And I’d be forever tied to him, an accessory he could use or dispose of any way he saw fit.

And then I found myself painted red, my wedding dress stained in blood. A man dead by my husband’s hands for simply touching my hair.

I was terrified of the lengths Nikolai would go to get what he wanted… to keep me as his, but despite all of that I felt something far stronger, far more dangerous.

Need. Want. Dark and depraved desire. And it was all for the man who said I was his.

For better or worse.

my review

I think I am just going to have to accept that, as much as I want to get on the Jenika Snow bandwagon, her books are just not for me. It’s not a quality issue (though the editing in Reckless Heir was pretty shoddy, especially toward the end). It’s that every one of her books that I have read has an ick factor for me.

In this one, it was how often and strongly the fact that Amara was barely 18 was stressed. Nikolai, who is 29, must have said young and innocent (code for young and virginal) about a million times. And yeah, I get that this is a dark romance, and he’s a murderous anti-hero. But I still did not enjoy it. Paired with the fact that the reader is told what a savage his father was ‘to the fairer sex,’ but the things Nikolai wants to do to Amara sound just like the things his father was doing to women in the previous book. (Guess the apple didn’t fall far enough for me.) So, the man too focused on how young his bride is and having tastes just a little too close to his sexually abusive father’s (who we are made to believe was irredeemable) made for an ick factor I couldn’t quite let go of. Also, I’m not a huge fan of the humiliation and degradation kink. But I could have handled that if it hadn’t been in combination with the ick.

When I finished this book and put it back on the shelf, I realized that I also have book 3, Corruption. I’d forgotten that. I know I should read it now so that they all get reviewed together. But I just don’t think I can take a third of these books in a row. And that should tell you a whole heck of a lot about how I’m feeling about the series at the moment. All the power to those who enjoy it. But I think it’s just not for me.


corruption photoAbout Corruption:

Even the beast could get the beauty… he just had to take her.

Anastasia was a Russian mafia princess.

I was unworthy to even look at her.

But that didn’t stop a bond, a friendship to form between us. She was the only good and right thing in my painful, brutal life. She was the only one who could look at my bruises and wounds and see I wasn’t a total waste of space.

But I was ripped away from her, thrust into the underground world of violence and fighting, molded and shaped to be the ultimate killing machine for the Bratva.

And that’s who I was now.

Razoreniye. Ruin.

Now, ten years later all of humanity had been stripped from me, all the emotion and empathy that I’d once felt taken away until I was nothing more than the beast who craved blood and had far too many kills tallied up.

But they could never take her away from me. And so I followed her, watched her through her bedroom window, broke into her apartment, and held her as she slept.

I wasn’t a good man. I was carved out from the very devil himself, and although I would ever be good enough for Anastasia, that didn’t mean I’d ever let anyone else have her.

So when she was forced to marry another, I did the only thing that made sense.

I took her in the middle of the night and kept her locked up until she realized she was mine and mine alone.

my review

I hadn’t actually intended to read this book at this point in time. But I decided that if I didn’t read it with the rest of the series, I probably would never come back and do it. So, I muscled through. Oddly, I actually liked this one more than I did either of the previous books. Ruin is even more unhinged than the rest of the men in this series (which is saying something), and that moved the book a little further away from reality into fantasy land. Plus, the ick (because, like I said before, all of Snow’s books seem to have an ick factor for me) is a relatively shallow one. I’m just not down with all the spitting. But that’s an aesthetic ick, not a full-body flinch like I encountered in Reckless Heir. The plot is pretty thin, and this feels like a middle book. But I suspect whether you like it or not will come down to if you like the sort of thing or not.


Other Reviews

Cold Hearted Bastard by Jenika Snow Release and Review

The Abstract Books Blog: Review Reckless Heir

 

dancing with the devil banner

Book Review: Dancing With the Devil, by Gayatri R.

I accepted a review copy of Dancing With the Devil, by Gayatri R./Gayatri Ramchandran. It was also featured over on Sadie’s Spotlight.
dancing with the devil cover

Corvo:
They didn’t call me “The Raven” for no reason.
I’m known for being ruthless, lethal, and dangerously magnetic. I’m a shadow, the monster pirouetting in the dark. I’m feared yet loved by all, and the entire city surrenders to my name as I rule them with an iron fist.
People always look both ways before crossing me.
Until Bianca Romano turned my life into a storm with just a single glance.
She became mine to keep.
My obsession.
My beautiful temptation.
I broke my rules for her, but that doesn’t mean she can control me.
She’s staying, and she wants to play my game.
But I’ll show her exactly who’s in control.

Bianca:
They call him “The Raven.”
Legend has it that if you look at him, there’s no going back. But I bent my rules for him, and now I’m his, with no way out.
Corvo De La Rossi isn’t the monster he claims to be.
Because I know underneath that brutal exterior lies a lot of pain.
If he’s the monster, the beast in this fairytale, then I’m the beauty who will put back the broken, lost pieces of him-the one who will tame him.

my review

I am in a really, really awkward place reviewing this book. So, I’m just going to lay it on the table. I received an Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) of this book. And often, ARCs come to reviewers before they’ve had their final editing pass. So, it’s not uncommon to find the occasional editing mishap. I’m used to that. We look over them. But Dancing With the Devil seemed to have come to me before it had any editing, despite releasing only days after I read it. The file I read was really quite rough. I would have DNFed it if I hadn’t been committed to the review.

I normally wouldn’t talk about this in a public review. It, of course, isn’t pertinent to those purchasing or reading the book after it’s had further editing. Presuming it does; we reviewers generally take it on faith that the books will get that additional, final pass. But I feel like I have to mention it here because I’m not wholly able to disentangle how much of my dislike for the book was because of how unpleasant and uncomfortable it was to actually read and how much was not liking the actual story and writing style itself. Do you see my difficulty? I don’t think I can fairly review it without including this note on a possible conflict.

At the end of the day, I gave this a 1-star. I might have been willing to grant it an extra star if I had a dancing with the devil photocleaner copy and knew some of the over-inflated dialogue was toned down and smoothed out. But I don’t think it ever would have been a real winner. Raven talks in catchphrases and monologues like a supervillain pretty much constantly. The plot judders along inconsistently. I was never even wholly able to decide if Raven’s demonic descriptions were meant to suggest he physically had a demonic form or was just poetic license on the author’s part. (So, I literally don’t know if this is a paranormal or contemporary book, AND I’VE FINISHED IT.)

All in all, the best I can maybe say for Gayatri R.’s Dancing With the Devil is that I finished it.


Other Reviews:

https://nolanerds.wordpress.com/2022/08/01/dancing-with-the-devil/

Cheryl’s Booknook: Book Review Dancing With the Devil

 

 

Deathless and Divided

Book Review of Deathless & Divided (The Chicago War, #1), by Bethany-Kris

I received an Audible code for a copy of Deathless & Divided, by Bethany-Kris. It’s narrated by Roberto Scarlato.

Description from Goodreads:

Lies and love. This is how a war starts.

A life for a life. That’s the mafia way. Damian Rossi owes his life to a man who is ready to collect. That payment comes in the form of an arranged marriage to the daughter of another leading family in the Chicago Outfit. He’s ready to follow through, even if that means making sure Lily knows she’s his.

Lily DeLuca isn’t being given a choice. Forced home to marry a man she doesn’t know and back into a life she’d rather forget, her world is full of half-truths, buried pain, and uncertainty. But Damian is nothing like she expects. His motives aren’t clear. Her beliefs are being tested.

When it comes to this world, no man can be trusted. Someone is ready to flip the Chicago Outfit on its side all for the promise of something better. But no one runs a clean game and these men play for keeps. When blood begins to paint Chicago red, four families will be divided by loyalty, hatred, and revenge. There is no hiding. There is no safety.

No one is deathless.

No one.

Review:

This wasn’t bad, not what I expected going in, but not bad. I liked that Lily wasn’t a push-over and Damian was too charming for words. I really liked all the behind the scenes manipulation happening between the bosses, though I guessed who was behind it all from the beginning. The writing flows and Scarlato, the narrator, did a good job. 

I did think Lily got over her resistance too quickly and then the two of them were instantly in love and willing to go to any lengths for one another. It was a little too much too quickly. But again, not bad. 

I just had one big complaint (that has multiple facets). While it may be goshe to talk about sex, I’m going to…in some detail. My first big complaint came with the first sex scene. The whole premise of the book is that Lily has been called home to Chicago and her mafia family to be married off. She’s angry about this, feels like chattel, struggles against the whole idea. Damian—her intended—tries hard to convince her this isn’t the case. So, when in the very first sex scene he starts all the “tell me who this belongs to” (when talking about her pussy), “you’re mine,” “say you’re mine,” “you belong to me,” etc it smacked as seriously out of place. It should have undone all his work to convince her she wasn’t a piece of property. It did not fit any of the previous set up of the plot. 

Second, I kind of wonder if Bethany-Kris doesn’t usually write MM romance, instead of M/F, because Lilly is the soppiest woman I’ve ever heard of during sex. There were so many references to things like HER cum leaking down her legs. I mean, that she’s wet is great, and maybe she’s a squirter (but none of that is mentioned) just lots and lots of HER cum. Merriam Weber reminds me that cum can be used as a noun to mean orgasm, but that’s not really how I sensed it being used here. It read like the fluids coming during orgasm, which Merriam Weber also dictates as specifically semen. So, all this cum felt off when referring to a CIS female character. I don’t think we had a single reference to Damian’s semen though. 

Lastly—and again this leads me to wonder if Bethany-Kris isn’t more comfortable with MM—the anal sex. I have no problem with this being included. Heck, change it up on occasion. Great. But the way it was build up as being something special and momentous irritated me. The way her giving him her ass is somehow more meaningful than any of the previous sex, like it’s a culminating act, felt contrived and pointlessly titillating. Plus, I knew with 100% certainty that was going to happen as soon as he mentioned it in the first sex scene. So, it was disappointedly predictable, not taboo and exciting in any fashion. 

All in all, as much as I like a good erotic book, the sex in this one often rubbed me the wrong way (pun intended). But I generally enjoyed the book.