Review: Wait For It

Because the alternative - that this gorgeous, rich man was somehow attracted to me - was a fairy tale.  And fairy tales were just shitty stories that no one really believed.

There's this long standing tradition in Romancelandia that readers like to call "glomming." (I'm going to credit this term to All About Romance because that's where I first heard it).  Anyway, it's the practice of discovering a new author and then going on a merry chase to acquire backlist in order to go on a reading binge.  I'm very good at acquiring the backlist thing.  The reading a bunch of books by the same author in a row?  Not so much.  Call it fear of burnout.  But, you see, I had a major book hangover after Burn Down the Night and frankly, Wait for It is the last book in this particular series by M. O'Keefe.  So despite my trepidation over the hero (who I found to be a flaming a-hole in the previous books in the series) - I tucked in to start reading.

And finished the book in a matter of hours.  I may need to go lay down for a bit after finishing this blog post...

Tiffany is 26-years-old, has three kids and an abusive husband who won't stay gone.  She finally got the courage to leave him a year ago.  Packed up the kids and moved to a dumpy apartment.  But, naturally, Phil came sniffing back around, she called the cops, and things got ugly.  Her and the kids scampered down the fire escape, got in the car, and went to her friend Annie's (see Everything I Left Unsaid and The Truth About Him).  What she didn't plan on?  That Annie and her husband would be throwing a Christmas party.  Oh, and that her asshole brother-in-law, Blake Edwards, would be there.

A while back Blake found out about Tiffany.  The entire family has cut Phil out of their lives, so the fact that the man had a wife he liked to beat up on and three kids he enjoyed terrorizing was unknown to them.  Blake has spent his entire life cleaning up after Phil and something inside him breaks.  He finds out about Tiffany and automatically assumes the worst.  In one of the best scenes I've ever read in a romance novel, he pays her off to make her "go away."  Blake is the kind of guy who used to have nothing and now has money - so to his way of thinking?  Money solves everything and keeps life from getting emotionally "messy."  Tiffany had stayed gone, until she literally had no other option.

This sets off a chain of events.  Blake, in a moment of clarity, realizes that he may have been wrong about her.  It probably helped when he saw her three kids in the back seat of her crappy Toyota.  He knows all too well what his brother is capable of and he sees this as another mess.  A problem to solve and make better.  But it's very complicated.  There's guilt, there's baggage, and then there's the fact that he likes Tiffany.  He really likes her.

How big of an ass was Blake in the earlier books in the series?  Let me put it this way - I found Max, the head of a criminal motorcycle club more sympathetic.  That scene where Blake "pays off" Tiffany is enough to get your blood boiling.  So I had reservations about him as a romance hero and naturally, O'Keefe makes it work.  How?  Well, it helps that he realizes early on that he was wrong and yet the author doesn't make the mistake of morphing him into a choir boy.  He has a lot to answer for once he and Tiffany enter into a "relationship" and to be fair to Tiffany, she's so emotionally screwed up after Phil you can see how she's terrified on one hand and grabbing at anything resembling a brass ring with the other.

This is another hard romance about hard people.  What keeps it all humming along is Tiffany, who despite years of abuse is never portrayed like a damsel in distress.  By the time our girl gets her own romance she is ALL out of fucks (pardon my language).  She is full up and has had enough.  But she knows she can't do it alone.  And loathe as she is to accept anything resembling help from Blake (who she doesn't trust, at all), she has no other choice.  This is a man with money, connections - frankly he can get her a good lawyer.  She NEEDS him, and she knows it.  But that doesn't mean she's going to make it easy for him.

As much as I loved Burn Down the Night, I think I may have liked this one a teensy bit better.  I found the trust issues and obstacles to the romance believable and heart-wrenching.  I loved Tiffany's strength and fire.  I loved that there was a good, decent guy inside Blake yearning to be set free.  My only quibble is I felt like the ending (once Phil is dispatched with...) was a bit rushed.  With all the baggage, I think I wanted to wallow around in the happy-ending a bit more.  Oh, like 50 pages more.  Plus, you know, it's the last book in the series.  But this is me being a glutton.

I only had two A reads all of 2017, a fact that left me horribly depressed.  I vowed to start 2018 off on the right foot and I knew that my Kindle held a treasure trove of possibilities.  O'Keefe has delivered two and I'm not done with the glom just yet....

Final Grade = A

Review: Burn Down the Night

First, yes I'm just now reading Burn Down the Night by M. O'Keefe.  Yes, I'm aware it's the third book in a series that everyone was talking about back in...oh, 2016.  What can I say?  You obviously have not had the pleasure of seeing the absurd contents of my Kindle.

Second, this is the book that helped inspire my recent post about "bad girl" heroines.  Unfortunately, on that score, this book is problematic.  Oh who am I kidding?  On all scores this is a problematic read.  But you know what?  I didn't care.  I was riveted from the moment I started to the moment I finished.  It had the same impact on me as the first book in the series (Everything I Left Unsaid) and wiped away any lingering malaise I had leftover from the second book (The Truth About Him - which frankly I thought was a rather pointless endeavor outside of anything involving the secondary characters).

This is the book where we finally get Joan as the heroine.  Joan is a stripper at the local seedy strip club that is a front for various criminal activities.  It's also a hangout for Max Daniels, the president of the Skulls Motorcycle Club.  Joan is the sort of character who, when caught in a bear trap, would gnaw off her own arm to escape.  She's a hard woman, as evidenced by her interactions with the other characters in the first two books.  She's also a woman with secrets.  A lot of them.  She's working some sort of angle but up until now readers were left wondering what game she was actually playing.  Turns out it's a game to save her younger sister, Jennifer, who is trapped in a cult that is a front for drug running.  And Max, our MC president, is naturally all wrapped up in the business of those drugs.

Max "got out" of the MC in the previous book.  He left.  He was in Arizona.  But when his brother called him home, he came.  And now the shit has really hit the fan.  Joan has found out that the cult leader is coming into the club to complete the drug deal.  She has plans.  Involving a couple of homemade bombs (yes, really) and a gun - all in the name of getting the psychopath cult leader to tell her where her sister is.  Max being there puts a fly in the ointment and naturally it all goes horribly wrong.  The cult leader gets away, Max gets beaten to a pulp by his "brothers" and shot for good measure.  Since Max is the last potential remaining link to finding her sister, Joan does the only sensible thing she can think of.  She kidnaps him and takes him to Florida.  She's going to convince this man to help her find her sister if it's the last thing she does.

I loved Joan in the first two books.  I LOVED HER!  She was brittle, all rough edges and very, very hard.  This is the sort of woman who could literally spit nails.  When I found out O'Keefe actually had plans to make her a heroine I was so excited, but also nervous.  Because I loved hard Joan.  I didn't want hard Joan to morph into a Rescue Me Princess all because she was finally getting a romance.  And praise jeebus, she doesn't.  That being said, there are obvious "reasons" Joan is the way Joan is.  I will say this, at least O'Keefe doesn't turn her into a tragic, misunderstood victim.  Joan is in the situation she is because she's made terrible choices.  She's spent her whole life pushing people away.  She's the sort who never dithers over fight or flight - she's the sort who will always choose flight.  Joan is looking out for Joan but feels this incredible amount of guilt over what has happened to her sister.  This guilt is what drives her character to the brink of exhaustion.

Then there's Max.  There's no way to sugarcoat this - Max is a criminal scumbag.  The guy is the president of an MC and was working out a drug deal with the cult leader.  I mean, there's no way to sugarcoat that - or is there?  O'Keefe is smart.  She doesn't make apologies for Max.  What makes his character from being totally unpalatable is that he was looking to get out.  He DID get out.  But family brought him back and having been in "the life" for that long - getting out isn't all that easy.  It's literally all he knows.

What we have is a romance between two cornered animals and it makes for fascinating reading.  Max is the one who comes around first.  Partly because he's looking for a way out anyway and also because he totally "gets" Joan.  I loved the fact that their big emotional Black Moment in this story is Max asking her if she ever gets tired of running, of being alone; of never asking anybody for help, even when it's blatantly obvious that's exactly what she needs - help from other people who care about her.  It's just that Joan makes it nearly impossible for those around her to care about her.  She keeps pushing them away.

This is a compellingly addictive story with a lot of really interesting edges to it.  It's also problematic as hell.  I can totally understand readers not wanting to read about an MC president and a stripper heroine who plants bombs and compulsively pushes everyone who gets anywhere near her far, far away.  These are hard characters.  But it also brings pretty high stakes into the potential romance.  Because O'Keefe has to "redeem" these characters enough so that you root for them, but also not morph them into pod people in order to accomplish that.  And I think she does.  Joan isn't my perfect "bad girl" heroine, but she's the one I have at the moment.  And you know what?  I'll take her.

Final Grade = A