Review: Another Kristen Ashley Hit
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 06 20, 2014
I'm beginning to think that Kristen Ashley can't write a bad or even mediocre book, no matter which series you read, she bats a 1000!  Heaven and Hell is no exception. H & H is not part of a series, but you do get to revisit with some characters from other KA books. The stars of this book are Sam, a former NFL star and Army Ranger/commando, who meets Kia, a beautiful young woman who is a survivor of domestic violence: her husband Cooter was the high school star football player and they married very young. Kia's husband is killed pretty early in the book by the husband of the woman he is having an affair with; Kia later finds out that her deceased husband and his mistress put a hit on her when Kia inherits the 5 million dollar insurance he took out on her so that he and the mistress could live happily ever after. Kia and Sam meet while Kia is on vacation in Italy after Cooter's death. One of the cute and hilarious aspects of their meeting is that Kia has had a crush on Sam forever; Kia semi-jokes with Sam that she kinda cyber stalked Sam to follow his career. We get to watch Kia and Sam fall in love, but as always, they have to overcome a lot of baggage, this time most of the baggage is Sam's, who lost a brother and his best friend to the war in Afghanistan.  This book will put you thru a ringer of emotions.  There are several tearful moments when Kia's family openly address the abuse her husband meted out on Kia and how they all tried to ignore or deny that it was going on.  Sam and his friends/family are also dealing with varying degrees of success with deaths of their loved ones as well. Then of course you have sexy alpha man Sam trying to protect Kia from the hit man, who has not been called off. There were times when I was really angry with Sam for being guarded and not completely giving his heart to Kia.KA also does a great job depicting how years of abuse affects how frightened Kia is of overt expressions of anger; Sam has to learn how to express anger without scaring Kia and she has to learn not to overreact to his anger. Eventually they get to their HEA. The only disappointment I have with the book, and this has come up in a few other KA books is that Sam is biracial (yeah!) but KA doesn't really do much with this, except to note that Sam is not really in touch with his racial/ethnic identity. I realize that there are some who think we live in a post-racial society, but this could have been an opportunity to explore race in bicultural relationships or how Sam's ethnic identity impacted him. There are so few people of color in romance novels and KA is one of the few authors who has greater racial diversity in her books, so I wish she'd explore this with a little more depth. I'm still waiting for the KA book that 1) makes race a more central part of the story and 2) has characters in their 50s with hot sex lives. I love it that many of her characters are in their late 30s and early 40s, now I would love her to features characters in their 50s to show that we older adults can  have passionate love lives as well!