Content Warning: Rape and Sexual Abuse of Minors, Human Trafficking, Infanticide
Rating: ★★★ | 359 pages | Romantic Suspense | Sourcebooks Casablanca | 5/1/2018
As far as the public knows, Mukta Parish uses her immense wealth and power to run her foundation and an elite private school for girls. In reality, the school is a cover for the activities of The League of Warrior Women–a vigilante group made up of Parish’s 28 adopted children. They’ve all been saved from abusive homes and trained by Mukta to take down human traffickers by any means necessary.
29-year-old Justice Parish has been full of rage since watching her biological sister die at the hands of their abuser. He current assignment is to take down a pair of notorious human traffickers in Jordan, but to do that she needs ex-Special Forces soldier Sandesh Ross’ humanitarian charity as a cover. Unsuspecting Sandesh finds himself inadvertently tangled up in The League’s secrets and with Justice Parish herself. I feel like the words on the front cover really sum this book up; He’s done with war. She’s just getting started.
There was a discussion in Romancelandia a few months ago about content warnings and I feel this book really needed one. There is a lot of brutality in this book and while the abuse isn’t overly explicit there is a lot of it and it can be fairly upsetting. I found myself having to put the book down at times because of it.
I vibed with the overall concept and character in this book but the plot didn’t work for me. Munoz creates this community of interesting and complex characters but it didn’t feel like she knew what to do with them. The plot often went into circles and characters had to make nonsense choices to make things work out in a specific way. The romance between Justice and Sandesh had no real spark and it felt like it was included out of obligation to the genre.
The plot of the book takes some unexpected turns at the end, you can expect a lot of revelations and twists all at once. I don’t want to get into spoilers but after some of those big reveals it is hard to believe how neatly it all ties up in the last chapter.
This book left me with a lot of questions, namely WHY IS THE BLONDE HAIR BLUE EYED WHITE GUY NAMES SANDESH ? We get nearly every character’s ethnicity (even other white characters) but never his. Okay, apparently he is named after an Egyptian family friend who was named after a Bangledeshi dessert...this feels like something they should have kept in the book because it’s really confusing.
Hmmm…so it looks like Sourcebooks is re-doing some of the marketing for this series. The name of series is now Black Ops Confidential instead of Band of Sisters and book two had a title change from I Am Grace to The Price of Grace.
