Title: Ruin
Author: CD Reiss
Publisher/Year: Flip City Media   10/14/14
Length: 269
Series: Songs of Corruption #2

Overview

Antonio is a killer.
He’s beautiful, educated, a prodigy of a thief and as violent a man as ever came off the boat from Napoli.

Theresa knows it, but that doesn’t stop her from getting emotionally and physically entangled with him, and this is how, maybe, she got it in her head that she can protect him.

But it’s not her job to save him, and she’s just not getting that. Every time she tries to protect him, she practically gets him killed, and the tighter he grips her, the more dangerous she becomes.

It’s almost as if…well, he’d never admit this….but it’s almost as if protecting her the way he does is he one thing he should stop. As if the only way he’s ever going to find a moment’s peace is to just embrace her as a partner, rather than a defenseless creature.

But he’d never do that. Not this violent man.

My Thoughts

i’m in a weird place with this one.  I’m a huge fan of CD Reiss and the parallel series that i’ve read so far, yet this 2nd installment in this series – Songs of Corruption just left me wanting something more.

If you remember back to when the first one came out, we were quickly introduced to Theresa – who’s a Drazen – a large family that’s quite powerful in the business realmn and Antonio – someone quite powerful in the Italian Mafia realm.  Of course , there was a lot of drama that ensued – since Theresa was dating someone who’s end goal was to take down the mafia ….leading to some great chemistry between these 2 leads.  i had such high hopes because the story line was getting very dicey and then my prolonged wait….left a bit to be wanted.

Where we pick up in this 2nd book – Ruin – is that Theresa’s in hiding with Antonio because of the attempt on her life as a result of her relationship with him.  So what we have for the first quarter of the book is a lot of her in hiding so to speak, not being able to really do much but wait for Spin to come back and have his way with her.  (i know – very direct and to the point there).

The rest of the story is a lot of back and forth about what’s going to happen with Spin’s territory, and what he has to do to get out of the lifestyle since he’s really not made for it and wants to have a life with Theresa – if he can.

What i’m struggling with is that we get a decent story line – yet it’s really not overly developed.  We see the stirrings of plans being set up to get out of the area – and live their lives together – but it’s just glossy – on the surface and never really getting too much further into the meat of it all.  We get to see a bit more of the interactions with Theresa’s many siblings, but again, just a topline level of it – and never really getting to hear about their background and growing up which would have added a bit more dimension to things.

There’s the expected amount of passion here – we see that there’s clear chemistry between Theresa and Antonio – and that’s certainly carries us through – but i feel like i kept wanting ‘more’.

Then there’s the epilogue – i think that it’s a good tease of things – gives you a sense of geography and the tension of a situation – but i don’t know what it means for the series itself.  I get the sense that this was a 2 book series, yet…..i don’t know.  So all in all, took me longer than i would have liked to read this – and it was just eh….. good news though is that i still love this author and there’s much much more to pickup and read.