“Dark, gritty and utterly captivating. I couldn’t put this book down!” - USA Today Bestselling Author, Natasha Knight
Book Description:
Sixty-four days in captivity. Sixty-four days to lose yourself—or find yourself.
I’m Ava Donovan. I was abducted at the age of nineteen. I’m told I’m a survivor, but the truth is, I only survived because he saved me. Even when he kept me locked in that room—he saved me.
Constantly wondering when and how you will die, that does something to you. To your mind. But what do you do when it does something to your heart? What do you do when the man holding you captive seems just as broken as you are, when his mere presence becomes a comfort you crave—when you love him even though you shouldn’t?
You smile and tell yourself it’s okay because love has no morals.
Sixty-four days in captivity gave me a love most people will never have and my freedom took it all away.
Buy Links:
Amazon UK: http://amzn.to/2d1EFC5
Amazon US: http://amzn.to/2cMp9cn
Amazon CA: https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B01LX5EEKO
Amazon AU: https://www.amazon.com.au/dp/B01LX5EEKO
Add it to Goodreads: http://bit.ly/2biDLmc
Our Review:
Reviewed by Donna ~ 4 stars
***ARC received for an honest review***
“…what good is freedom to a bird
who has no wings?”
Darkest Before Dawn is a book of tragedy, one after the
other. Where one tragedy fuels another and the cycle is endless…until one man
makes a difference. It is a book of grief and desperation and a clever manipulation
of your heart and head, where the author gives you a dose of Stockholm Syndrome
as you cannot help but fall in love with a captor…a captor with a heart. A
captor whose heart should be black and shrivelled, the life he was made to live
and leave being the cause of its destruction. But, because of that life, he had
the propensity to love, he had morals and scruples and despite the black he is
surrounded by, he finally found his chink of light. A chink of light that may be
lit just for him, he saved her once, can he save her again?
“It’s not why I’m keeping you
here that matters, it’s why I’m not letting you go…”
Stevie J Cole weaves a clever tale and one that I read from
start to finish without coming up for air. With a prologue like that you know
that you are in for one hell of a bumpy, emotional ride and yet while it didn’t
deliver what I had imagined, what it did, I loved. This was not as dark as I
expected, maybe that is a result of some evil minds in this author world that
just deliver all kinds of crazy. But what Steve J Cole delivered was a love story
borne from the most horrendous of situations, where the life ribbons of our
past cross and weave and lightening definitely strikes twice, where karma knows
no bounds and fate has its own morbid way on delivering your soul mate. That
one person that understands you completely, the light and the dark, where your
heart beats for another and where no matter what is deemed right or wrong, love
always wins. When your heart chooses, a life without is one not worth living.
“Love – out of all the emotions
there are, is the one which can cause the greatest upheaval of a person’s soul
for it is the only emotion that promises to give you something in return. Even
when that emotion is nothing more than a lie…”
Max was exposed to death and tragedy in the worst possible
way, but born into a family with mafia ties it was a foregone conclusion that
his exposure was inevitable. An exposure that would leave its mark and would
forever alter his path. The only family Max had left was his sister and when
she goes missing he makes it his mission to find her and eradicate the scum
that had the balls to take her. Max has to infiltrate the traffickers who steal
these women off the streets, break them and sell them on to rich men to do
whatever the hell they want. He becomes one of them, the master manipulator,
the saviour of their nightmares. He makes them love him, but what happens when
one makes you love them back?
“He fucks me with his movements
and makes love to me with his words.”
Ava, a woman born into wealth but a wealth born of blood
money. Her father is a hitman and while she has never been on the frontline she
knows what goes on behind the scenes. She is clever, she is smart but she is
also wounded. Wounded by a past and secrets that have never been told, a past
that has sculpted her into the person she is today, a woman chasing the dark
when only presented with light. When she is kidnapped and held captive in a
dark basement has she finally found the dark she has been desperately craving.
With a permanent sense of fear what happens when the captor she should be
afraid of the most, suddenly becomes her strength?
“The door slams shut and I’m left
to self-reflect on the fact that, since the day I was born, I have found
comfort in the arms of a murderer.”
I don’t want to say too much about this story, the intricate
layers that Stevie J Cole delivers need to be read first hand and experienced
in the way the author intended. In a tragic tale that may have had my eyes leaking
a few times as the author cleverly unwinds their back stories and you see they
have more in common than you think. Where pain and heartbreak are commonalities
and where to find love in the dark you need to have experienced it to fall.
Where people are happy to label and make blanket generalisations but actually really
don’t understand. Their circumstances may have been unconventional but their
love wasn’t. It takes the broken to understand the broken, but maybe, just
maybe, these two maybe the glue for one another to make themselves whole. They
will never be “normal” but they will live their normal but at least they would
be happy…
“I love you as certain dark
things are to be loved, in secret, between the shadow and the soul…” ~ Pablo
Neruda
About the Author:
Stevie J. Cole is a secret rock star. Sex, drugs and, oh wait, no, just sex. She’s a whore for a British accent and has an unhealthy obsession with Russell Brand. She and LP Lovell plan to elope in Vegas and breed the world’s most epic child.
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