Rating: ★★ | 217 pages | Loveswept | Contemporary | Deacons of Bourbon Street # 1 | 8/4/2015
I’m going to sum up my reading of this book in GIF form.
The only reason I own this book is because I liked the final book in the series and wanted to go back to get the full story. What I didn’t take into account is that this series features books written by different authors with different styles and tastes and let’s just say Megan Crane’s aesthetic is just not for me.
This series picks up a decade after Priest, the president of The Deacons of Bourbon Street Motorcycle Club, mysteriously orders all the active club members out of the city. Now Priest is dead (possibly under mysterious circumstances) and Ajax,the former Vice President, is rolling back in town for the funeral and finds himself caught up with Priest’s only daughter Sophie.
I like Crane’s writing style and I love a good Putting The Band Back Togetherbut the borderline misogyny and treating women as property thing just really got to me. Ajax is such a supreme alphahole. Within the first few pages he shoves the heroine against a wall because she won’t use his road name. He’s just constantly pushing, ordering and dragging Sophie around and even makes reference to punishing her by hitting her. And I guess maybe the uber-alpha-masculinity is a staple in MC books and a favorite trope of the authors who write this series ? I just didn’t notice it as much in Yates’ book. Probably because that hero in that book was questioning some of the things about the motorcycle club life.
Sophie is billed as this tough character who can “take it” and hold her own, but she just fell flat and she was constantly walking outside in provocative clothes for reasons that aren’t 100% clear to me.* I just really wished Sophie had been better developed or had some friends who she could talk to so she didn’t seem so one dimensional and dependent on Ajax.
With a promising plot but flat characters, alpha overload and toxic masculinity galore– this book should have been a DNF for me but I wanted to give it a full chance and it only got worse.
* Okay, so I guess the reason this book opens with Sophie walking the street dressed as a topless showgirl is becauseCrane saw a woman actually doing this and it inspired her to put together this series.