HMM. Well, I wanted to dive headfirst into the twisted mafia mind of Zoe Blake, so headfirst I jumped. And Sweet Ferocity certainly captivated me in places, and left me less enamoured in others.
Truth be told, some of my lukewarm feelings for this are a me issue. This is the final book in a series of purported interconnected standalones, but the first half of this book read like a cliff note’s summary- a lot of action happening quickly, many characters jumping in and out, and a lot of off page action being reported in and wrapped up in a sentence or two. From what I gather, these events happened in prior stories- with some plot overlap between them. And that’s always such a pickle for interconnected standalone writing- newer readers (like me) find it insufficient and series readers probably find it redundant, even though the foundation of these characters has to be articulated in some way. For the first half of the book, I felt like we just got a lot of incomplete/sparse action and very little character development or chemistry.
And then we get to the anticipated dubcon moments, and those also fell a bit, well, unsexy, for me. I love an over the top possessive anti-hero who has no issues dominating his woman, even if that means giving her no choice but to be with him. I love dark romance, but the early sex scenes lacked real heat and intensity- the edge was more painful than sexy. I mean I guess props for being realistic that it probably hurts for a virgin to be deflowered with such possessive brutality- but also it made me cringe a bit. Truthfully, I felt I was missing something, since I know so many others find these books addictive.
The back half, I would say, was much more appealing- after we got through the obligatory rehashing and you’re mine claiming and settled into Katie’s college life post kidnapping, that part of the story actually fascinated me. I’ve seen a mafia heiress be kidnapped and rescued 100x times at least, but seeing a regular old college student be “wooed” by a mafia assassin, well that seems a bit more original and a lot more fun. The sexy times still had a bit of cringe to it- but got a bit hotter as Katie got more into it, and one thing I did really appreciate is seeing bad-a Luka want to lift up and Katie and support her in pursuing her dreams- so long as she was shackled to him. A bit different spin. When the mafia action kicked back in, it was a bit less fun- again, felt done before and also characters from prior books that I should know but didn’t. But the interesting part of this story made it worth the read- and the chemistry certainly kicked in a way that helped me “get” the addiction to this series. I may read the others, not sure- but as far as tropes go, this series is pretty up my alley, so I wanted to really adore this- and found the parts I liked outweighed those that were lukewarm.