I’m sitting here scratching my head trying to figure something out. I’ve been hooked on the Sinners on Tour series by Olivia Cunning, read through Backstage Pass and Rock Hard – thinking that i could cruise into book 3 Double Time while waiting for book 4 Hot Ticket to come out. So I started reading Double Time and realized that i’m kind of lost.
at the end of book 2, we know that Sed and Jess get together and are basically on the edge of a proposal. We know that Brian and Myrna have decided that they want a baby soon…and that’s basically it.
Then i pick up what’s labeled as Book 3, and well, there’s so much that clearly happened that even after just 7-8 chapters, i feel like something has gone drastically wrong. People are coupled off, married, there’s been a bus accident, the Sinners have already put out their latest album. where did the time go?
so now i’m a bit miffed, upset and overall confused. I go back and read some of the summary to what’s called book 4 – and find that maybe that’s supposed to be book 3 and they were just released out of order? So now, the part that makes me more annoyed, not just that i have to wait for the real book 3 to come out, but that i know what’s going to happen because i’ve already read about 60+ pages of the sequel.
kind of ruins the suspense a bit – so i might have to distance myself from the series for a while, hopefully forget what i just read about, read a few other things and then maybe by the time that Hot Ticket comes out, i’ll be able to put a fresh lens on things.
Ahhh….the bliss and enjoyment that i find in sequels to stories that are actually good! Rock Hard is the follow up to Backstage Pass – and it didn’t let me down. In book 1 we are introduced to Sinners – a rock band that is of course made up of 5 of the hottest sexiest men around.
We already know the story around Brian and Myrna since book 1 centered around them and their budding relationship. We also got to know a bit more about Trey, Sed, Jace and even Eric – but not tooooooo much.
So book 2, Rock Hard starts in a bit of a confusing place. We’re introduced to Jessica and Sed – they are clearly in a relationship and that’s what threw me off since it was my understanding that Sed was single in BP. Then i had to remember after a few minutes that there was a scene in book 1 where Sed is sitting at a table on the bus and Myr catches him looking at a picture of a girl. So…this means that this intro scene is a little bit of a flashback.
That being the case, we meet Jess when she’s breaking up with Sed since he’s not entirely all that supportive of her goal of becoming a lawyer. He basically wants to take care of her and have her just be there for him. She’s not having that, so she returns the engagement ring that he had just given her and we are then fast fowarded into present day.
Sed is the womanizer and sex addict that we came to love and appreciate in BP, and Jess is trying to pay for school with a summer stint as a stripper in Vegas. Ironically, the Sinners are in Vegas for a show and decide that for Brian’s bachelor party they are going to go to a strip club, and of all the clubs in Vegas, they go to the ONE that Jess is working at.
Shock, surprise, lust and a bit of brawling all get rolled up into this scene, leaving the sinners all bruised and battered, and Jess w/o a job. Sed finds out that Jess has been fired, tries to give her money to make up for it, she goes to return the money, and ends up working for Myr on tour w/ the Sinners.
One thing that we all know from a deep emotion like ‘Hate’ is that it comes from a true place, usually love. Well, Sed and Jess clearly HATE each other, yet they quite obviously love each other as well, even if they aren’t ready to admit it to themselves or each other. The story that ensues from here takes us on a roller coaster with both of them, with their lives together and separately, and with all the paths that they go down, it’s hard to picture exactly where they are going to end up.
In the middle of all this, there’s a medical emergency that comes into play, not for either Sed or Jess, but for Trey, as a result of the brawl at the strip club that first reunion night. that alone adds in enough drama and suspense to keep the story going in a completely different way.
There are times when i hoped for a happy ending and times when i thought that it would be too cliche. the good news is that Olivia Cunning did a great job and gave us less of what we’d expect and more of what readers really want. Now i can’t wait to finish Double Time the 3rd installment of the series.
I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of this book since it sounds like it’s focal point is a hard rock back, but i decided to give it a read since i’m a HUGE fan of series (vs. individual stories) that can sustain my insterest for a while.
So in Backstage Pass, we are introduced first to Myrna who is a professor (has her PhD) in Human Sexuality and she’s just given a lecture at a conference. I don’t know about anyone else, but the first thought that comes to mind in a story that you know is going to turn erotic, is ‘naughty professor’ and with a name like Myrna, you can get all these images into your head. Once you meet you, you come to find that she’s clearly less bookish than she would seem with a name like Myrna, and that she’s in fact got a rock edge to her, and included that edge into her presentation with the riffs from a well known back ‘The Sinners’. un-beknownst to her, this love of the band will come in handy.
She’s walking through her hotel on that same night and hears a commotion in the lounge, and finds not at all what she’s expecting – the usual conference goers, but instead, the same band that she really enjoys – THE SINNERS. They are drunk, and loud and exactly what she needed to see. She finds her courage and walks over to them and the rest is history.
She’s hit on by Sed – who is the sexy lead singer of the group, Eric, the drummer, Trey and Jace are doing their thing, and Brian is soo drunk that he can’t even keep a thought flowing in his mind that even makes sense. I think that we all know what happens here right? she’s drawn to all of them, but is able to disway the attention of the guys that are making the most overt passes at her, and some how decides that she’s going to come to Brian’s rescue after he throws up all over the place. She invites him up to her room for a hangover cure, although that’s not quite what Brian thinks when he’s invited up to her room.
After a night of nothingness – Myrna won’t have sex on the ‘first/second date’ and Brian really is too drunk to do much aside from pass out, they find themselves in each others arms in the morning for some AMAZING sex. (of course). Instead of going back home that morning, she throws caution to the wind, and joins the band onto their next tour stop. Never a good move for someone who’s supposed to have a respectable job…but when there’s good sex, all logic goes out the window. So Myran joins the band to their next stop, enjoys mind blowing sex and then has to find her way back home the next day to get bck to the real world.
Now…to back up a second, throughout this story, Myr has some internal strife going on. She’s been married before, to a man who clearly thought her a whore and was apt to tell her this all the time. The issue here is that no, she was not a whore, but she is a sex professor and of course wants to make things less vanilla and much spicier. Her husband took that to mean that she was probably cheating on him in order to get these thoughts/positions and all this experience and it certainly crushed her a bit. On top of that, he started to drink A LOT and as a result, almost killed her with his rage.
So, we’re fast forwarding to her present day life…where she’s a bit gun shy about emotions, and men, and how she’s kind of even gone into hiding a bit so that she doesn’t ever have to deal with this asshole again. This of course becomes a problem for her when she finds that she LOVES having her ‘relationship’ with Brian because she can be as uninhibited as she wants, she doesn’t have to worry about being considered dirty or whorish becuase that’s part of what just works between them.
Life comes in the way of what they have…Myr has to figure things out professionally which gives her more of a reason to stick around the band and Brian, but that doesn’t address any of her personal struggles and that’s what keeps the book moving. It’s never easy, and it’s never clear what’s going to happen between Myr and Brian and the rest of the band for that matter.
The good thing about this first book is that the Olivia Cunning really has given us a view of all of the band members, and we see them for more than just the instruments that they play. They have emotions and quirks and I can only hope that we get to see more of them and all this inter personal stuff in the future books in the series.
Definitely pick it up – there’s nothing timid or quiet/shy about the eroticism in the story. you won’t be disappointed.
