Review: 5 Stars for Jakes Best Writing Yet! Trust Me...
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 12 3, 2013
~ ~ ~TRUSTTRUSTTRUSTTrust me when I tell you that this is the best thing SE Jakes has written, and she's been entertaining me with her writing for a while now. This book is an entirely new level of writing and story development for this author. Watching a series get better and better is a great thrill. With recurring characters and revisited storylines it could have easily slipped, instead the energy feels charged and the layers of inter-connectedness are much more complex. Which gives this series the potential to really explode.This is a culmination of the last three books and you have to be on your toes to keep up. It's worth the effort though. And geez, I haven't even told you how sexy it is.THE CHARACTERS"He could blame the drink or the stress, but really, the rough touch and the handling always did it for him."Yeah, me too.Lucky (Josh Kent) - Lucky is this beautiful wild-card throughout this book. You will completely fall for him, want to protect him, and hold him, while holding him at arms length too.Dashiell (Dash) Bain - Yeah, come on Dash, just plow right ahead and take what you want. D-mn.I love the chemistry between these two. It is all chemistry in the beginning and sometimes that's not okay, but it works here because the relationship gets to build into more, and isn't that what we really want to see?Additional CharactersRex - Poor, torn Rex.Sawyer - Wow, I can only wish I could have played it so cool. I love Sawyer.Clint - The Rock.Jace - If I could buy a best friend it would be Jace.Cooper - So. D-mn. Smooth.THE STORYLucky is living a happy-go-lucky life. He's safe, has his needs filled and he's happy. Sure he's lonely, but you would be too if you couldn't remember anything earlier than four years ago. He also knows he doesn't want to know what happened four years ago and he's got the scars to prove it.Dash lives a very secret double life, one he can't even share with his family. For their safety. When he discovers the thing he's been trying to keep his family safe from is living with them his entire world turns upside down. And then the mental tug-of-war he plays with himself? It's just...mental.By way of this discovery many, many lives are affected. Many of the men we've read about previously in the Men of Honor series are about to have to revisit a past from which they are still trying to recover.Jakes often weaves a paranormal or even a mystical thread into her work in a way that feels like that unexplainable energy in the universe. Works for me. It never overwhelms the story, it just puts a bit of possibility into it. In this story you will find some unlikely coincidences, but they are acknowledged as such. Sometimes you are just where the universe wants you to be.There is one minor continuity fact that I keep questioning, but I'm going to my favorite boards to sort that out. I'm sure it's something I just didn't connect with.From the jungle, to the brig, to beaches and bedrooms hang on for an ambitious story that has tension, tenderness, torture and trust. Trust, trust, trust."Lucky was being treated with a mixture of respect and suspicion, sometimes both at the same time, and it was beginning to freak him the -uck out.[...]But now that he was here, he was given extra escorts into the building. Men in uniform who surrounded him like he was a bomb they were worried would detonate.Am I?"THE WRITING"They forced you to believe the lies."This felt so much like reading a movie that I just kept losing myself in it. The complexity and multi-layered connections woven into this story set it apart from everything Jakes has written previously. This is a giant step forward in her work, but I don't think it's a fluke at all. She's been improving constantly and I'm more anxious than ever to read what she writes next. With this book she has moved into a category of writer that I feel very comfortable giving 5 stars to.~ ~ ~I would like to thank SE Jakes and Samhain Publishing for providing me with an advance copy in exchange for my honest review.~ ~ ~