Haven’s Creed by Parker Williams

Safe Haven #1

328 pages

Buy links: Amazon US | Amazon UK

Blurb

An act of violence destroys his family and ends the life he knows. To escape his haunted past, he joins the military, where, as a sniper, he is trained to kill with precision and detachment. When a covert organization offers him a new purpose, he becomes Haven, an operative devoted to protecting the innocent when he can and avenging them when he cannot.

After ten years of battling the evil in the world, the life no longer holds the attraction or meaning it once had, and he’s ready to walk away. Then he meets Samuel, a young man forced from the age of twelve to work as a sex slave. If ever a man had a need for Haven, it is this one.

Yet nothing about this growing relationship is one-sided. Sammy gives Haven a stability he’s never known, and Haven becomes the rock upon which Sammy knows he can depend.

When Sammy reveals something about the enemy Haven has been hunting for months, Sammy fears it will destroy what they’ve built and he’ll lose his home in Haven’s heart.

Review

Well now. You know how I always say that I like books that surprise me? How I prefer books that are not like so many other books out there but bring something unique to my reading life? That’s exactly what happened when I opened Haven’s Creed. Sure, if you strip the story down to its barest parts it is a love story telling the tale of how Haven and Sammy got together and how they managed to make what should have been an impossible relationship work. But, it is so very much more than that.

I’m not quite sure how to describe what I’ve just finished reading but the closest I can get is to say this story gives us a study in humanity. It shows us both the worst and the best people can be. And it gives us characters who are so much more than they appear to be at first glance. Allow me to go back to the beginning, so to speak.

Haven. Poor Haven. Forced into an unthinkable act of violence to protect his mother and sister at far too young an age, he is trained, first by the army and then by the organisation that recruits him, to use that violence as a force for good. His acts may be extremely violent, bordering on sadistic at times, but his reasons for hurting and killing his targets are the best; he needs to protect the innocent victims to atone for the fact that he couldn’t prevent the horror that befell his sister. At first glance it would be easy to write him off as some sort of a psychopath, only prevented from being evil by the fact he’s working for ‘the good guys’, but even early on in the story, before he ever sets eyes on Sammy, there are clues that Haven’s deeds are not the result of some inherent blood lust, that there is a softer, needier side to him, even if he refuses to acknowledge that.

Sammy. *Sighs* Sammy tore at my heartstrings from the moment he was introduced. Everything he’s been through should have killed his spirit, turned him into an unredeemable mess, but it didn’t. At least, not entirely. He may be afraid of virtually all people. He may be borderline agoraphobic. He isn’t weak. And despite what I thought at first, he’s also not fixated on Haven like a baby goose who will view whoever they see first when they come out of the egg (or in Sammy’s case, captivity) as their parent or guide. Somehow Sammy managed to hang on to his inner core despite the horrors he was subjected to. And that gives him a stunning form a fragile strength. And, just as Sammy is exactly what Haven needs to allow his full personality to shine, Haven is what Sammy needs in order to find himself again.

And that, what I’ve described in the previous two paragraphs, is what made this book so very special for me. These characters are multi layered. Haven is not ‘just’ a killing machine, and Sammy is so much more than ‘just’ a victim. Like ‘real’ people they have their strengths and their weaknesses. And just as so often happens in ‘real’ relationships, their coming together allows them to grow into their full potential, to allow sides of themselves they weren’t even aware of, to come to the fore and shine.

Haven’s Creed has been added to my extra special list because the story was captivating and the characters fascinating. It deserves its place because Haven and Sammy as well as Kelly and Rook were allowed to develop and grow as characters and show me their full potential. There’s nothing superficial or easy about this story or the characters in it, and that’s what makes it a fabulous book. Bring on Haven’s War, and thank goodness it won’t be a long wait.

Coming June 26, 2017

Staged by Kim Fielding

Staged (Belonging #3) by Kim Fielding

Pages: 255

Copy received from Riptide Publishing through Netgalley

E-book / Paperback

The blurb:

Once the second-prize winner on My Slave’s Got Talent, Sky Blue has spent the past few years singing at a failing New York nightclub. While Sky has never had control over his fate, his life seems to take a turn for the worse when he’s torn from the familiar comfort of performing and sold to a rich and enigmatic man.

Morgan Wallace takes his newly purchased slave to San Francisco, his intentions unclear. On the one hand, he treats Sky with more kindness than Sky has ever known—treats him like a real person. On the other hand, he shares Sky at parties hosted by his sadistic new friends.

A confused slave is an endangered slave, and Sky isn’t even sure of his master’s real name. Is he Morgan Wallace, wealthy and cruel, or Mackenzie Webster, caring and compassionate? Caught between hope, fear, and an undeniably growing attachment, Sky struggles to untangle which parts are real and which are merely a performance. His future, his heart, and even his life may depend on it.

Reader discretion advised. This title contains the following sensitive themes:

dubious consent
explicit violence
non-consent

My thoughts:

For possibly the first time ever I’m not entirely sure whether or not this review contains (a)spoiler(s). Proceed with caution.

First things first. While this is the third book in a series it can easily be read as a stand-alone. In fact at no point while reading this story did I feel I was missing information or wished for more background on either the characters or the world the story is set in. While Staged certainly made me curious about those earlier books, I don’t think there’s any need to read them first…unless you want to of course J

Staged. *sigh* The story is told from Sky Blue’s perspective and I think Kim Fielding did an amazing job getting into the head space of a man who was born a slave, raised a slave and destined to always be a slave. His descriptions of his life were devastating. It wasn’t just the fact that he was treated without any consideration, at best, and with cruel disregard at worst, although that was heartbreaking enough. What really got to me was that he basically lived a life without any possibility of it ever getting better. It wasn’t so much that he lived without hope, because he still wished for an owner who wouldn’t be cruel, who wouldn’t hurt or mistreat him, but as hopes go, that is scraping the barrel. What really got to me was his resignation and the fact that it made perfect sense. When being a slave is all you’ve ever known, when you’ve been told so often that you are less, that you don’t feel like normal—free—people do, that you almost believe it, resignation is probably the only way to survive.

Given that context it makes perfect sense for Sky to be utterly confused when his new Master, Morgan Wallace (or is it Mackenzie Webster?) treats him with kindness, looks after him, buys him nice clothes, and cooks him great food. Sky has never encountered this before. Nobody has ever cared about his comfort or his feelings, and he has no idea how to deal with someone who appears to do just that. Especially when that same person is also the man who hands him over to strangers to be hurt and abused in the most horrific ways, only to tenderly nurse him back to health afterwards.

Poor Sky is confused and doesn’t know what to think. For me the one issue I had with this book was that I didn’t share Sky’s confusion and fear about his new Master. As early as the third chapter Wallace has told Sky that he’s sorry about what he will have to put him through, but that he doesn’t have a choice. While Sky doesn’t have the frame of reference to either understand or fully believe that statement, for me as a reader, that was the moment the story lost some of its tension and became less dark, despite the fact that the horrendous abuse scenes were still to come.

This is of course a very personal opinion and others may well disagree with me, but I would have preferred it if I’d been kept guessing about Wallace, his motives, and his feelings towards Sky. While the fact that I, as the spectator, didn’t worry about Wallace as much as Sky did, was a wonderful way to illustrate how Sky’s slave mind worked, it did, for me, make the story less edgy than I thought it would be.

Other than that one point, this book was wonderful. The world it describes is ours, except that slavery is an almost worldwide routine, and that makes the story that much more credible and scary; it’s all too easy to believe in this version of the world. I completely and utterly fell for Sky and cheered him on for every step of his long, difficult, painful, and confusing journey, and rejoiced when he finally found his own power.

I’m impressed that the author managed to give me a clear idea about who Webster was and what he felt without ever getting into his head. We only see him from Sky’s perspective and yet we see Webster’s struggle clearer than Sky can. That is fabulous writing.

One word of warning. There are a few very ugly scenes in this book. While they are ‘only’ scenes and not the tone of the book, they will without a doubt shock some readers. Having said that, comparatively speaking, those dark scenes make up only a small part of the story. Most of this book tells the story of two men from different worlds, with no idea about the other person’s reality, learning about each other and in the process about themselves.

Overall this was a very good, very well written and totally engrossing book. I’m very glad I had four consecutive hours of almost uninterrupted reading time because I don’t think I would have been able to put the book down for whatever reason. While the book wasn’t quite as dark as I expected it to be, and I would have preferred to have been kept guessing about Webster a while longer, I still highly recommend this as a fabulous read.