Review: Ruin & Rule by Pepper Winters

This book was completely fucking ludicrous, lacked depth and was completely full of smut. And maybe that is why I loved it. Ruin & Rule is one of those books, an emotionally charged page turner full of good looking people. This one was published a couple of years ago, when contemporary romances set in illegal motorcycle clubs was a thing. (Seriously, what is it with contemporary romances and trends? At one point, the heroes were all rock stars. At another point in time they were all wealthy businessmen. Then there were the rural romances. What next? Will we soon all be reviewing contemporary romances that praise the swoonworthy qualities of dark and brooding Formula One car drivers? Or what about Sam, the hunky bad boy emergency services worker who is the male lead in Dial Triple Zero My Panties Are on Fire?)

Anyway, this one opens with a female lead who has just been abducted. She's suffering amnesia. She has no idea who she is, but she knows that she's been abducted by the Pure Corruption Motorcycle Club and they intend to traffic her. Then she meets Kill, the angsty but extremely attractive president. There's something familiar about him, something that she cannot quite understand. Meanwhile, Kill is treating her with a mixture of horror and delight. For it turns out, she bares an uncanny resemblance to a girl from his past, a girl he loved fully and completely. A girl who is dead.

When he takes her home, our female lead soon begins to realise that the girl he loved may not be dead after all ...

I'm not going to bother adding a spoiler alert here, because the twist is pretty obvious. What kept me reading was wanting to know how the story unfolded and how those truths would be revealed. Would love be enough to conquer all?

This one is what it is. It's a romance with a bad boy lead and some scorching sex scenes. It's a romance with a plot that is pretty out there.

It's also, as it turns out, the first book in a two part series so after four hundred pages I learned that I had worked my way to a cliffhanger ending. Will I be back for part two? Probably.

Sidenote: I was a bit confused about the nationality of the author as although the novel was set in the United States, the female lead was a duel British/American citizen, and parts of the novel leaned toward the possibility that the author was British. After a search on wikipeadia, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that she was born and raised in Hong Kong.

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