A Winding and Violent Journey to Love...
"UnLeash Me” is the fourth installment of Hayley Faiman’s “Savage Beast MC” series. It is the story of Eagle and Della. Della being the young woman we first met in book one who was taken as collateral. A girl traded into the clubwhore ranks in order to save her father from death. A sweet, smart, yet complicated woman now embroiled in an even stickier situation within the club and drowning under the chaotic depths of obsession. And Eagle, the quiet, contemplative yet equally brutal member of the Savage Beast MC. A man who embraces the violence of the MC life without hesitation, but who silently and privately harbors a thoughtful side not yet seen within the brother's in books one through three. A man whose dark past paints his future in doubt, and whose present mindset harbors an unwanted emotional truth that will not only take Della by surprise, but set dangerous things in motion within the clubhouse walls.
What follows is the most jarring and violent story yet. Here with Eagle and Della, Faiman paints an almost tortured tale of damaged self worth, crippling doubt, oppressive obsession, and profound emotional cruelty. A story of a woman, despite a wealthy upbringing, who sees herself unworthy of anything beyond being a whore. An MC brother lost to his own anger and pride. And growing fractures within the club itself. It is an explosive installment. A story, that in my opinion, is the most unapologetically dark, vicious, and emotionally action packed installment yet about the Savage Beasts.
Della's plight will touch something deep within you, triggering a protective instinct that will have you screaming for help with every passing page. Eagle's insight into his brothers, especially Jaguar, will have you cheering one moment and gasping the next. It is yet another powerfully poignant portrayal of the perils of love, family, and brotherhood by Faiman.
Here, once again, she writes characters that fall on both sides of the spectrum. Rather than romanticizing all of the bikers as being undercover, emotionally intelligent teddy bears, as is so often the case within this romance subgenre, she writes messy, unapologetically real characters. Characters who struggle internally day-to-day with the raging plethora of wants, needs, and desires swirling within them as they navigate their chosen path filled with darkness, danger, and mayhem. And Eagle's story, as it intertwines with Della's is the most stunningly raw one yet.
However, it is also one that made me the angriest because as it pulls you deep within its depths. As Della's circumstances and Eagle's choices plunge you, word by methodically written word, into the very depths of uncertainty and despair, the methodical plotting stops and shifts, so violently, to its conclusion, that it gives you whiplash!
It is something that has been my most consistent critcism of this series, how Faiman abruptly shifts from the meat of things to the end in an unsatisfactory and stunted manner. And here, with Eagle and Della's journey, this cut from the precipice of discovery straight to the end is at its most pronounced. The shift will torture you with it's jarring leap into the conclusion after Faiman's methodically plotted lead up. It is a jump from the highest emotional highs to the end, lurching you heartlessly from the story world cliff into the depths of their finality. A stunning shift that affected me with an uncontrollable, visceral loathing, especially where the highly suspenseful Columbia arc is concerned.
I literally did a double take wondering if I had missed a chapter, stunned at the complete omission of such a large amount of plot detail, especially where Jaguar and the Columbia faction are concerned. It is a consistent pattern of absence of detail and plot follow through that continues to be the single reason each and every book falls short of the five stars it really deserves for me.
This series will make you an addict by the end of chapter one of the first book. Each book after that will pull you in deeper. However, with each hit you also get increasingly frustrated as the journey gets painfully truncated and flashes forward, leaving you sweaty, unsatisfied, and desperately yearning for just a bit more...
Will I stop reading, no, no I won't. But, I need that extra detail bump in the middle to be happy and fully satisfied.