I’m the girl you’ll never see coming.

Blink and you’re dead, another target checked off my list.

But one night everything in my carefully ordered existence falls apart. A bloodbath and a car crash later, I find myself in the grasp of four gorgeous, intimidating men.

Are my captors cops like they claim or something far more sinister? They sure know how to bend the law. And seeing how skillfully they handle a gun or a knife, I can’t help wondering what their hands would feel like all over me.

But I have vengeance to wreak, and no man, no matter how powerful, is going to keep me caged for long.

They think they’ve caught a wounded little mouse. How could they know they’ve brought a killer into their home?

I’ll bide my time, learn all I can, and when I’m ready to strike…

They’ll never know what hit them.

This book was recommended by Goodreads, so I did have a higher expectation for it. Goodreads has scarcely led me wrong. On Amazon, the book classes itself as ‘crime thriller’ and ‘contemporary romance’. It’s set up to be a reverse harem but there is barely any action taken in regard to that in this first book. This is a series of 4 books, so there is plenty of time for development and evolution to take place.

We meet the MC Decima in curious circumstances. The book opens in a very unique way and not at all in a way I was expecting. The story, told between the point of views of Decima and the Chaos Crew includes a whole web of lies, mistrust, and mystery.

We meet her in a blood bath, a car crash, and a kidnapping. Decima is a special character with more layers than an onion could ever hope to achieve. The base plot is incredibly strong, and the plot stays steady throughout the book, there is no point where the base plot takes a step back. The authors are very consistent in the way they want to tell this story.

With this series, the reverse harem aspect will come second to the plot. It’ll be interesting to see with the coming books whether the reverse harem aspect intertwines with the base plot of whether it runs co-currently or whether they stay separate.

While I mentioned that we get point of views from the Chaos Crew – Julius, Blaze, Garrison, and Talon – the main bulk of what we learn is from Decima’s point of view. For every admission she makes about herself, there is one more secret in the closet. Learning about the Chaos Crew is dominated by Decima’s thinking, so we learn about them in a more analytical light – seeing how Decima can use information to better herself rather than getting to know them for friendship.

Trust, or lack thereof, plays a large part in this book. Decima is a character that can only survive in the pages of a book and the trust she has in what she knows is strongly visible throughout the read. Similarly, the Chaos Crew lack trust when it comes to Decima, preferring to sedate her and keep her in the dark.

Decima and the Chaos Crew are polar opposites when standing against each other but actually they’re quite similar in terms of the skills they have. The Chaos Crews closet may not contain as many skeletons as Decima, but they still have their secrets.

This is, however, a slow read. With only 322pg you might be inclined to think that this is a book to read in less than a day. However, the book isn’t relying on action to push the book faster. Rather, observations and careful planning go into driving the plot forward and thus, we end up with a slow-moving book.

It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it did make it harder to read. I like a book that captures me from the first one, a book that I have to read regardless of where I am or what I am doing. This book wasn’t like that. I read it across a couple of days.

It was the plot that kept me coming back. I was waiting for the spicy aspect of the reverse harem but the more I read the more I realised that wasn’t coming and I switched what I was after. It was the lies and the twisted truth I was interested in, and the dual authors did a good job of creating a plot that needed to be answered. I did wonder how long the charade would keep going. When I was reading the last third of this book I did wonder if the ending would make sense to what I had read.

The ending is a cliffhanger of sorts, but it is an expected one – you’ll understand if you read the book. It wasn’t the cliffhanger that I was interested in. I’m more interested in how the second book will play out knowing that the cliffhanger was revealed.

Decima’s onion layers will need to be revealed for her character to have any chance at adapting and evolving in the circumstances she finds herself in. If the rest of the series keeps the strong plot seen here, I have no worries of that happening.

I give this book: ✨✨✨✨