3.5 stars
Brief synopsis: Rodion is a mafia enforcer who's been banished to California for screwing up one too many times (presumably for something that happened in book 1, but I haven't read it yet; will update if I do). He accidentally overhears some women gushing about mafia-themed thirst traps they watch on social media and he's both intrigued and baffled that his lifestyle is basically a fetish. He joins the social media platform to see what these girls are hyping about, and then he comes across the account of Ember, a book reviewer who talks about her favorite tropes (mafia romance, BDSM, various kinks). He becomes obsessed with her pretty much immediately. Unlike the accounts that seem "fake" to him, he thinks Ember genuinely craves the fantasies she posts about. So he decides to test the waters.
So right off the bat, you may notice, this premise is a lot like Lights Out by Navessa Allen. So much so that I wonder if it's not coincidence. And there's nothing wrong with that; a lot of romance books are derivative, especially mafia ones, and there's enough original content in here that it doesn't feel like a rip-off. In fact, on paper, I might even like this better than the plot of Lights Out. Unfortunately, the execution is where the books really are not comparable.
First off, the editing leaves a lot to be desired. There aren't many obvious typos or anything like that, but the narrative is sometimes repetitive, sometimes vague, and sometimes contradictory. Scene changes are not always clear. That kind of thing.
Then there's the formatting. Text messages and social media DMs are a big part of the book's plot, and there are a LOT of mistakes here. Mostly the Kindle version shows messages in the little bubbles like you see on a phone, but sometimes the text is all bold, sometimes only the sender's name is bold, sometimes none of it is bold, and sometimes there is no bubble at all, only italicized text. One time the code is visible. I sincerely hope the paperback version turned out better than this because if I paid $16 for a book with this kind of formatting, I'd want my money back.
Then there's the more substantial problem with the book, which is the antagonist. I don't think we ever learn exactly what Shawn did to Ember; a lot is implied, and some things can be inferred, but we never get any specifics. And I guess that's fine in a sense - like, if this were real life, we wouldn't be entitled to know everything about Ember's past - but this is fiction and we're reading Ember's POV. I feel like we should know more about her past in order to understand her. Even worse, there's a point at which Rodion implies that Ember has confided in him about Shawn, but that apparently happened off-page. Why? Additionally, Shawn is just not characterized. I don't mean that he's not well-developed; he's not developed at all. We don't get any sense of him as a person beyond the fact that he's bad and dangerous and Ember is scared of him. He barely appears on the page so he's more of an antagonizing force than a character in his own right. More confusingly, SPOILERS FOR REST OF PARAGRAPH for most of the book it seems like he's fixated on Ember specifically, but after he's been dealth with, we randomly hear that he's harassed and assaulted a bunch of other women, so I guess he wasn't fixated on Ember? There were no indications that he was a serial abuser or predator or whatever it is that he is (again, we don't know; the book doesn't tell us) so this comes out of left field. END SPOILERS
Finally, I have some petty critiques. Perhaps the most important one is that I don't think the author has ever, um, recorded video before. Rodion's videos are described as involving camera movements, specifically panning and zooming, and it would be impossible for him to do that without a second person or editing, and we know that he is filming these videos by himself and uploading the raw footage online. Another camera oddity: Ember lives in a studio apartment, but at one point she starts developing a roll of film . . . in her apartment? The narrative doesn't talk about her going anywhere, but if she can't fit a full-sized fridge or a stove in her apartment she definitely doesn't have space to turn her studio into a dark room. That was weird and completely unnecessary. Lastly, everyone who has read Crime and Punishment (which is referenced directly in this book) knows that the diminutive for Rodion is Rodya, and the only time we ever see a nickname for Rodion is when one of his sisters calls him . . . Rodi. I'm just so disappointed by that.
A slightly less petty critique is that this book pokes fun at mafia romance novels for being unrealistic without actually subverting any of the tropes of the mafia romance genre. Lampooning your own genre is fantastic and hilarious, but ONLY IF you do something different with your own book, and Jane Henry does not. The only difference between the in-universe "real" mafia guys and the "fictional" ones is that the "real" guys don't wear suits all the time. And that's all. Pretty much every other trope is represented here. It would have been really great if this novel had subverted mafia romance stereotypes in some way, but alas, it did not.
Bottom line: this is an okay book that is fun to read, but it's not nearly as good as Lights Out so maybe read that instead, or at least in addition.