Title: Three to get Ready
Author: Skye Warren
Publisher/Year:  Dangerous Press 2/16/23
Length:  145 pages
Series: Hughes #3

Overview

There’s a ticking time bomb in Finn Hughes’s head.

That means he has to prepare everyone. Eva. The baby. The company, which is in an uproar after the announcement. He needs to get them ready. Because when the curse hits, it will be too late to say goodbye.

My Thoughts

This is one of those stories that feels like you don’t know when the next hit is coming – but you know that your cast of characters are more than capable of managing the fallout. Finn and Eva are perhaps the strongest in each of their families, partially because of innately who they are but partially because of the responsibility that was forced on them through the role they play in the center of their worlds.

I’m going to take a quick step back on this book for just a second because something parallel to real life happened this past week that directly related to this story in a sense. We know that dementia is the leading factory of the Hughes family narrative, and for those of you who are up to date in pop culture, you know that Bruce Willis just came out announcing that he has been diagnosed with Dementia. So we now can see the effect that this has, on the quality of life, the longevity of life of all those that are affected, and hope that like this story portrays, elevating the understanding of a condition can help find new and less traditional means to slow down negative progress and improve life, even if a diagnosis is terminal.

Back to the story – so we were left off from book 2 where Finn was forced to give his father a ‘proper’ retirement sendoff since the CFO and others were asking questions about his lack of appearance and visibility within the company. That backfired as his father Daniel didn’t have the longevity needed for clarity and being lucid and his condition was revealed. This causes the expected blowout with the press, with the finance world, with everyone.

On one hand we have Finn who’s been running the company successfully for years, and now has to be second guessed. We have the Hughes family that needs to do some sort of damage control. We have the Morellis who are on the same wavelength with a need to do PR against this and we have Eva who says ‘just let it blow over’.

Which path do they go? well the one that Eva sets in place since she’s the voice of reason. She’s also pregnant and we know better than to argue with a pregnant woman.

The trajectory of this story is a lovely one. We watch how Eva and Finn navigate the world that they are in now, dodging bullets (theoretical for once – not actual) and growing together. Often at this point in stories we watch couples get torn apart, seeing that there are too many obstacles to be successful, but yet they are able to make it work.

We watch how the families have their own agendas to find a path forward and we watch how Finn trying to make the necessary arrangements with the company to stay in control. We see Hemingway grow up and we get insight into the past for the Hughes family, both for Finn and his promises as a child to his father as well as where Geneva, his mother came from and how she was raised. Gives us a pretty good glimpse into how they became the people that they are.

The underlying thee in this third installment though is the notion that there is a Hughes curse, that Finn is destined to have dementia and there’s a fear that if Eva is pregnant with a boy (WHEN she is pregnant with a boy since that’s all that Hughes have) that he too will have Dementia. This puts Eva on a quest to invest even harder for a treatment to cure or slow progression and we get to watch how she goes down that path.

This finale to the series gives us hope, makes us emotional and show you strength. I think that they paid the right attention to the right details here, all wrapped with the precise level of sensuality and chemistry that was needed at the right moments. Now this of course means that i have to figure out which siblings I haven’t read about yet and get to those series – so off I go. Enjoy!