4.6 stars

As much as I loved the person that Marist ultimately ended up with, it almost felt second best. I didn't get the butterfly feelings as I did with the one she didn't end up with. God knows I wanted to. The connection and mind games we're extraordinary. Even though my guy disnr win, I'm looking forward to who is next, which incidentally, is a standalone after the fact for this trilogy. ( )

3.5 stars, definitely not a bad conclusion to this part of the series. I enjoyed it but it's very similar to the last two books and at this point, I think it felt a bit dull.

Even thought a lot of the the high drama stuff continues into this book, I just found it a bit more boring. There is a lot more negotiation that I didn't find very interesting. There were more sex scenes and they were find but they all started reading as kind of the same. The stuff that I think was supposed to be really shocking I didn't find that shocking because there wasn't much escalation from other books. BUT THEN, the ending was filled with drama and action that just felt completely ridiculous to me. So much came out of nowhere or wasn't set up well in my mind. I also thought it was unfortunate that Alice tries to kill Marist and Royce again at the end because I think Marist's sympathy and empathy towards other people to be an important part of her character and by making Alice an actual bad person after Marist has given her sympathy, it kind of is saying that having empathy for people is bad actually!

The relationship was fine but I still found Royce to be really boring. It was hard for me to get invested in their relationship when I found one half of the relationship to be incredibly dull. He is just a lot more boring that Macalister and even though I didn't really want Marist to end up with Macalister, he was the more interesting character and it made the actual relationship harder to get into.

I know there is another book in this series technically that is about Macalister and Sophia Alby, who is a bit player in these books. I want to read more about Macalister, but I don't care at all about Sophia and I'm not sure I'm interested in any relationship between them when the only set up is that Sophia called him hot a couple of times. I'll probably read it because I like this author's writing but I doubt I'll get to it right away. ( )

4.5??? maybe??

i’m sad marist and macalister didn’t do anything, even though it was always clear she would never end up with him. their chemistry was so interesting and different that the passion her and royce had; i desperately wanted it to go further than it did.
i’m SHOCKED that alice was killed in the way she was, and that macalister went to jail for it. i’m not sold on reading the next couple of books simply bc i know they’ll be about that gossipy girl (a-something?) but i’ll give it a go just to see if macalister changes at all.

( )