Sunday 26 April 2020

The Priest (Original Sinners #9) by Tiffany Reisz




Publisher: 8th Circle Press
Pages: 432
Buy Links: Amazon US | Amazon UK

Blurb

New Orleans, four months after the events of THE QUEEN...

Søren has been suspended from the Jesuits for a minimum of one year after confessing to fathering a child. To say he's struggling with his newfound freedom is an understatement.

Kingsley is about to be a father again and is convinced something very bad is about to happen. Nerves? Or is he right that the time has come for the Sinners to pay for their sins?

And if things couldn't get worse, a handsome private detective shows up and tells Mistress Nora that a priest has just committed suicide, and she was the last person he tried to call. He would like to know why...

She doesn't know, but Nora and her new detective friend will turn over the city to find out, meeting liars, vampires, and witches along the way. When she finds what she's looking for, she may wish she'd never stepped foot in New Orleans.


Review                     

“They were more like a spiderweb, all of them, made of filaments so fragile and fine nothing could put them back together if one of them was torn away…”

… and Nora decides to help investigate a suicide that may well cause those filaments to shrivel up and die.

Oh my God, what a book. I’m not sure how I’m going to put my thoughts and feelings into words, especially since I want to avoid spoilers, but … WOW. Not that I’m surprised. Tiffany Reisz is yet to let me down. But I’m not sure I was ready for this story. Then again, maybe I was. Maybe I’d been waiting for this story ever since I first read the Siren.

I’m sorry, I’m reviewing in riddles, and I can’t promise that’s going to get a whole lot better as I go on. I want to say all the things, and I don’t want to risk spoiling even the tiniest of details.

As always with Tiffany Reisz, this is a story with many layers; quite possibly more than I managed to discover on a first read. There’s the mystery Nora gets pulled into after a priest commits suicide. The last number he called before pulling the trigger was Nora’s old number and when Cyrus, the private detective trying to find out why the priest took this drastic action, approaches her, he pulls her into the case. A case which will bring them into contact with fascinating characters, vampires, and witches (well, what would you expect in New Orleans?). A case that will show Cyrus a way of life he barely knew existed, and a case that will turn two people who, at first glance, have very little in common, into friends.

But there’s more…so much more. There’s Søren and Nora and their complicated, fascinating, scary, and stunningly beautiful, yet fragile relationship.

“Twenty-three years together, and he could still make her toes curl and give her goosebumps and scare her down to the bone.
It was a sacred thing to be loved by a sadist like Søren. Sacred like a sacrifice, like a vestal virgin offered to a god. What was a god, anyway, but one who held the power of life and death in his hands? By that measure, surely Søren qualified, if only when they made love.”

And there’s the thing I don’t want to mention except to say that it answered something I’d been wondering about for as long as I’ve been reading the Original Sinners’ books. I approve of the way that ‘issue’ was resolved. It made sense and I had been anticipating it. And it was a wonderful illustration of how we sometimes don’t allow ourselves to see the full picture of who we are and how we reached a certain point in our lives until something from the outside forces us to open our eyes.

Again, I’m sorry. I’m being horribly mysterious but, if you are still to read the book, you wouldn’t thank me for saying more.

There was so much to love in this book. Kingsley, Juliette (expecting her second baby), and Celeste are delightful secondary characters. I adored Nora’s dog, Gmork. But I think I loved the developing friendship between Nora and Cyrus best. These two have little to nothing in common and Cyrus is definitely not a part of Nora’s kinky world. But their differences allowed them to be exactly what the other needed at various points in the story and I can’t help hoping that we’ll see more of Cyrus and his fiancée Paulina in future books.

I’m going to leave it here. Nobody is going to get anything out me making more vague yet gushing statements. Just go and read the book. And if you’ve so far managed to miss the Original Sinners’ series (what stone have you been living under?), all I can say is, pick up The Siren and start on a journey that will mesmerize and captivate you. Nine books in, and all titles still feature at the top of my ‘extra-special list’.

“If anything in the world was truly a sin, it was letting one’s own mild discomfort interfere with someone else’s healing.”



Friday 17 April 2020

The Interrogation – a Hunter Dane Investigation by Adira August




196 Pages
Buy links: Amazon US | Amazon UK
Also available in Kindle Unlimited

Blurb

Hunter’s most twisted killer. Cam’s most dangerous case.


“SO WHO GOT DEAD?”
Twee asked, taking a pastry. Merisi pulled the plate away from her and closer to himself.
“Three little boys," Hunter told them. "The fourth went missing this morning. If this killer’s M.O. hasn’t changed, the boy’s not dead yet.”
“You’re talking about the Wilderness Killer?” Diane Natani asked. “That’s McCauley’s case. How is our unit getting it?”
“The victim is the governor’s nephew. McCauley and his team haven’t gotten anywhere in a year. The governor requested us, and we’re taking over.”
“Well, that shouldn’t cause any resentment.” Merisi dunked half a doughnut into his coffee.
“It’s a recipe for a clusterfuck, Boss,” Twee said.
"True. It’s also exactly the kind of case this Unit was created to handle."
Natani tossed down her pen. “We have political interference, departmental incompetence, personal resentment, and a boy who will die within eight hours. Somewhere.”
"No problem. We find the killer and get him to tell us where in the 1200 square miles of Colorado wilderness he staked out the governor’s nephew.” Merisi punctuated this with an eyeroll.
“The first part got done about an hour ago.”
Assistant District Attorney Natani perked up. “We have a suspect?”
Hunter nodded. "We do. Now I just have to get him to talk.”
“Just get him to talk?” Merisi tilted his chair back. “He’ll lawyer up before you can say ‘You have the right’ and a keyhole satellite couldn’t find this kid.”
“You're forgetting the Boss’s cardinal rule.” Twee pulled the plate back toward herself and Merisi’s chair came down with a sharp bang.
“Yeah? What's that?"

“Never assume.”


If you like a master gamesman for a detective and a few twists in your criminal cocktail, you want to read this.
A STAND-ALONE PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER

 Review

Unless you’ve never seen one of my reviews before, you probably know I’m a HUGE fan of Hunt & Cam. I’ve been with them from the very start and eagerly await every subsequent book. These two men are glorious together. Made for each other, Hunter Dane and Camden Snow come to life on the pages of these stories, and worm their way into your heart and head…well, they did for me.

But, if you’ve read the previous stories, you probably need to know that this book is different from the earlier titles. Where the older stories focus on the relationship between Hunt and Cam and their D/s dynamic with Hunter day job taking a (growing) backseat, The Interrogation is a pure and simple thriller. While the feelings they have for each other are still vivid, there are no on-the-page sex scenes to be found in this story.

As for the crime? When a young boy disappears, Hunter is put in charge of the case. The kidnapper is soon apprehended, but there’s no sign of the boy. He’s been left, somewhere in the wilderness to die a slow and horrible death in a blizzard that’s about to strike in a matter of hours. In a race against time, Hunter must get the man to talk while Cam is out searching for his victim. As the snow starts to fall, more than one life is at stake.

I have to admit that before I started The Interrogation I wondered if I would miss those extremely enticing scenes. Would Hunt & Cam be able to captivate me as much without getting their clothes off, without their ever so imaginative sexual encounters?

I’m very happy that I’m able to answer that question with a whole-hearted ‘YES’. The investigation in this story, the search for the young missing boy, and the tension during the interrogation were so intense that I didn’t have time to miss the sex. In fact, the timeline in this story is so tight that any time-out for private escapades would have felt wrong, contrived, and shoe-horned in. And yet, even without describing any explicit intimacies, the reader is never in any doubt how much these men mean to each other, how they live and breath for and because of the other.

This is one of those stories that forces the reader to pay close attention. Nothing is exactly what it seems. Nothing unfolds as you might expect. And you’ll find yourself torn between wanting to read slowly, just to make sure you don’t miss anything, and the urge to rush along and discover how it all ends. Between a manipulative perpetrator, policing politics and rivalries, an innocent young victim, a race against time, and a heroic dog, there really isn’t anything in this book not to love. But, best of all, as always, are Hunter and Camden: two heroes so perfect they shouldn’t work and yet manage to be memorable and incredibly more-ish.

Can I have the next book, please?