Unstuck Pages
  • Home
  • About
  • Gushes and Rants
    • How I write reviews
    • Latest reviews
    • Reviews by Author
    • Reviews by Title
    • Review Requests
  • Features
    • Blog Tour
  • Contact Me
Top Posts
Shipped by Angie Hockman
Flight by Laura Griffin
Sweet Dandelion by Micalea Smeltzer
Hard Pursuit by Pamela Clare
Ever After Always by Chloe Liese
To Whatever End by Lindsey Frydman
Yes & I Love You by Roni Loren
Mission: Her Justice by Anna Hackett
Tamed by Alison Aimes
Thanks for Last Night by Lauren Blakely

Unstuck Pages

Gushes and rants about fictional worlds

  • Home
  • About
  • Gushes and Rants
    • How I write reviews
    • Latest reviews
    • Reviews by Author
    • Reviews by Title
    • Review Requests
  • Features
    • Blog Tour
  • Contact Me
Action/AdventureContemporary RomanceMilitary/ParamilitaryReviewsRomantic SuspenseSpeculative Fiction

Where Death Meets the Devil by L.J. Hayward

written by Dísir 16th June 2020
Where Death Meets the Devil by L.J. HaywardWhere Death Meets the Devil by L.J. Hayward
Series: Death and the Devil, #1
Published by Riptide Publishing on 26th February 2018
Pages: 395
Buy on Amazon
Goodreads
five-stars

Jack Reardon, former SAS soldier and current Australian Meta-State asset, has seen some messy battles. But “messy” takes on a whole new meaning when he finds himself tied to a chair in a torture shack, his cover blown wide open, all thanks to notorious killer-for-hire Ethan Blade.

Blade is everything Jack doesn’t believe in: remorseless, detached, lawless. Yet, Jack’s only chance to survive is to strike a bargain with the devil and join forces with Blade. As they trek across a hostile desert, Jack learns that Blade is much more than a dead-eyed killer—and harder to resist than he should be.

A year later, Jack is home and finally getting his life on track. Then Ethan Blade reappears and throws it all into chaos once more. It’s impossible to trust the assassin, especially when his presence casts doubts on Jack’s loyalty to his country, but Jack cannot ignore what Blade’s return means: the mess that brought them together is far from over, and Ethan might just bring back the piece of Jack’s soul he thought he’d lost forever.

‘Where Death Meets the Devil’ made me take few deep breaths simply because of how brilliantly well-crafted and written it is—and that’s on me for not discovering L.J. Hayward’s fantastic start to a series that’s got so much more going for it even after I’ve finished the first book with my mind blown.

It all starts off with Jack Reardon in deep cover and getting compromised after his long year of infiltrating and spending a crappy birthday in a torture shack. But this is merely the tip of an iceberg of the security operations of a so-called Metastate—a fictional, uber-secretive meta-coalition of Australasian nations tasked specifically to deal with threats and counterterrorism, where in itself, motives are blurred and personal agendas overlap. Enter Ethan Blade—a Sugar-baby assassin, whose stone-cold killing ways and contradictory personality traits defy Jack’s every expectation.

Both Jack and Ethan are fantastic and complex characters—despite me getting to know Jack more intimately than Ethan, written as this is solely from Jack’s POV and his perception of Ethan, the more mysterious and enigmatic other protagonist and love-interest who still has so much depths to plumb. I loved their chemistry, the mental tug-of-war they had as they each battled with trust and betrayal and the slow burn that finally sparked off into hot rolls in the hay (quite literally at times)—all of which were explored so deftly and confidently by Hayward.

The action goes back and forth as ‘then’ and ‘now’ in alternating chapters—events that took place in the past that still have resounding consequences a year later—which did prove jarring at the start. But the confusion did ease eventually, as I slid into a steady run of action both timelines and from there felt as though it was akin to watching 2 highly entertaining movies running in your head at once, starring the same characters, just at different points in their lives.

In some books, the characters outshine the plot and in other, it’s vice versa. Here, both stand out, playing off and against each other in a way that capture the ever-changing dynamic between the protagonists and those who stand against them, just as the driving forward momentum barely slows down with narrative twists and turns that you meander through while trying not to slip off.

That the first book ends with something rather unsettled didn’t bother me so much at all oddly—Hayward promises more after all with more books in the series.

five-stars
Where Death Meets the Devil by L.J. Hayward was last modified: June 12th, 2020 by Dísir
  • Related Posts
Just Once by Addison Fox
Threat of Danger by Dana Marton
Tight Quarters by Annabeth Albert
The Tourist Attraction by Sarah Morgenthaler
The Tourist Attraction by Sarah Morgenthaler
Worth the Wait by Jamie Beck
Antipodean AuthorsContemporary RomanceKickass Herom-mRomantic SuspenseSmuttyspooks-spies-n-suchwtf-plottwist
0 comment
0
Facebook Twitter Google + Pinterest
Dísir

previous post
Hard Edge by Pamela Clare
next post
Ten Rules for Faking It by Sophie Sullivan

You may also like

Catalyst by Rachel Grant

24th October 2017

Royally Romanov by Teri Wilson

2nd July 2017

Protector for Hire by Tawna Fenske

30th June 2015

Wrecked by Sherilee Gray

23rd December 2015

Starbreaker by Amanda Bouchet

24th February 2020

Locked, Loaded, & Lying by Sarah Andre

14th June 2015

The Sapphire Affair by Lauren Blakely

27th June 2016

Forever After by Leeanna Morgan

11th April 2014

Man Candy by Jessica Lemmon

15th October 2017

Playing the Player by Lisa Brown Roberts

16th September 2015

Leave a Comment Cancel Reply

@2016 - PenciDesign. All Right Reserved. Designed and Developed by PenciDesign


Back To Top