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Review

6 STARS!!!

A gorgeously hot ultra-protective guy reunited with his gorgeously hot but messed up first love 22 years after she broke his heart and he never knew why. Throw in a brilliant cast of family and friends, the usual KA banter, steam and swooniness and one freaky as all hell serial killer, and you have utter perfection!

OK, I had to give myself some time to contain the gush-fest that I would have written immediately after finishing the book, but I’ve managed to calm down, and am able to restrain myself (at least a little bit), so here goes.

Feb is a lost soul who has returned to her home town after 15 years of aimless wandering while trying to hide from mistakes in her past. Colt is a stable, respected detective, and the local eye candy. Oh, and he’s also absolutely incredible!! He’s everything you would possibly want in a guy, but without the usual OTT-Alpha that you see in a lot of other KA heroes (not that I’m complaining in any way, because we all love that as well!!!). They have been avoiding each other for the two years since Feb’s return, but the chemistry between these two is intense – childhood sweethearts who are still in love with each other after all of these years apart.

The POV alternates between Feb and Colt, which I loved, because we get to see not only what they’re going through now, but also their perceptions of what happened in the past to tear these two apart and how they dealt with it. The back-part of the story unravels slowly, and you get clues along the way that help you piece it all together.

The inevitable reunion is realistic and oh-so-swoony (and pretty freaking hot as well – whew!), and there are some very intense scenes as they come to realise exactly what happened to tear them apart, and then figure out how to move forward. What I really loved about their relationship was that they both accepted fault for how it all went down, and then they didn’t dwell on it. It happened, but looking back and wishing wasn’t going to change anything, so they were both prepared to put it behind them and move on. And even though the intense connection had been there between them all along, they recognised that who you are as a person at 20 is completely different from who you are at 40, so it was useless trying to pick up exactly where they left off. They just needed to move on and start fresh – and I loved that!

The serial killer storyline is horrific and creepy. The killer is fixated on Feb, and reading how this affected her and Colt was both devastating and beautiful as they were inexorably drawn to each other – Feb turning to Colt for support and Colt just wanting to protect his girl (awwww).

Throughout all of the drama though there are some very funny moments, and a great cast of characters. I loved that the whole town was cheering for their reunion and watching everything unfold – cell phones in hand, ready to capture any little moments. And that Feb and Colt both knew it and totally didn’t care!

The usual KA-end-of-book-climax is intense and tragic; my heart was racing while reading it. And as for the HEA – well it was pretty freaking epic. Not only did we get a gorgeously swoony story come to completion, but all of the characters that we came to love throughout the story are involved, so we get to see their reactions to the events as well. The whole thing left me bouncing up and down and squeeing like an idiot.

Like anyone who reads KA books, I am forever a die hard fan and will read anything she writes (seriously, I’d read her grocery list at this point and get excited over it), and it struck me again in this book just how brilliant her writing is. KA depicts her scenes so vividly, she puts you right in the scene with her characters, and you can feel all of the emotion and picture it all happening as if it was right in front of you. It makes for some heart-wrenching reading, but the intensely emotional scenes that she writes are part of the reason I love her books so much. She’s a master.