The Heir of Shadows by Candice M. WrightMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Not a Relaxing Read
**Just a quick warning that there is sexual and physical abuse featured in this book. If you feel that this subject matter might cause you to experience emotional distress, you should probably skip this book.**
Ava is the daughter of Garrett, a serial killer cop who went undercover at Kings of Carnage for years. Garrett is obsessed with his daughter and his abuse of her started early on. Though she managed to escape for a while with her uncle, under witness protection, she was forced out into the light when Garrett found a perfect replacement victim in Reign, who Ava’s uncle had come to care for.
After Ava emerged from witness protection she was abducted by Garrett and her uncle was killed. She has been subject to his obsession for a year and a half, whilst her newly discovered brother, Saint, and the rest of the Kings of Carnage hunt for her.
The story starts just before Ava gets away from her father and the book gets going with quite traumatic events. You don’t get eased into this book. In fact, I didn’t really ‘enjoy’ this book. There is quite a lot of difficult subject matter, and it doesn’t have much in the way of levity to counterbalance it. I also found it difficult to connect to Ava, and I think that is because of the trauma involved which subjugated a lot of her normal personality and that a chunk of the book was more about how she was viewed than what she was experiencing. I understand why the author made this choice, for plot reasons, but it didn’t help me actually empathise with the character much until towards the end of the book when more of her actual personality was allowed out.
I felt that the author took some shortcuts on character development for the male characters in this book because they had appeared in previous books in the series. It meant that they didn’t really show themselves properly in this book, which I felt was a bit of a shame, as they are all interesting characters.
This felt like a necessary book for the series as a whole, but as a stand-alone book, it didn’t work for me as much as the other books in the series. However, I will still be downloading the next book in the series as soon as possible because I really want to know what happens next as there was a tiny bit of a cliffhanger at the end of the book.
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