I’ll burn the world down for her.
NashI left my hometown behind. I joined the military, disappeared into black ops, and became a weapon for my country. I have no regrets.
Except one with pretty hazel eyes.
Now I’m retired, living a quiet life hiding in plain sight in Las Vegas. I still think of her. The prettiest girl I ever knew. My best friend’s little sister.
But I swore to leave her alone to live a normal life. That I wouldn’t drag her into the darkness.
Then I find out her life isn’t golden.
She’s in danger and I have the right set of skills to save her.
GeorgieYour life can change in an instant. One second, you have a happy family and a crush on your brother’s best friend.The next, you’ve lost everyone you ever loved.
My family is dead and my sister fell prey to a predator. A rich, connected man who promised her the world.
And gave her hell instead.
Now, I have nothing left but a burning need for vengeance.
Until I collide with the boy who left me behind. A boy who’s now a tough, dangerous man.
He says he’ll protect me. He says he’ll help me take down my sister’s killer.
I might survive my revenge, but will I survive when he walks away from me again?

My Review:

From a certain point of view, this is a bit of a forbidden fruit kind of romance. Once upon a time, Georgie was just the little girl who followed her older brother and his best friend around their small town – and Nash was that ‘big brother’s best friend’. She had a crush and he thought she was too young for him.

Until she wasn’t. And he noticed.

But fate intervened when Nash and Elliott enlisted in the Army, Elliott was killed in action and Nash and his grief were recruited into the kind of operations that get blacked out in someone’s service record. The kind of operations that Vander Norcross used to run. (I expect Norcross Security to show up sooner or later, as that particular match is delightfully obvious even from this first book in the series.)

By the time we meet Nash, and he meets Georgie again, the good, golden life he’s always imagined for her is nowhere to be found. She’s all alone in the world, not just her brother but also her parents and her sister have died. Her parents’ long drawn out illnesses took the family savings and both her and her sister’s dreams.

Her sister Viv died in Las Vegas, the victim of a serial user who took advantage of her dreams to make her life a nightmare. Now it’s Georgie’s turn for that nightmare – unless she gets him first. Permanently.

At least that’s her plan.

A plan that her old crush, Nash Oakley, now a retired assassin, can make come true for Georgie and the families of this particular scumbag’s victims – and his posse of scumbags because like calls to like. All he has to do is just get his head out of his daydreams to get behind (or in front, or wherever she’ll have him) the woman who has always haunted his dreams.

She’s ALREADY come to the dark side. It’s up to Nash to provide the help (and the cookies) she needs to make her dreams of vengeance come true. With the help of his very own posse of retired assassins who won’t care that this particular job is unsanctioned – because it’s righteous all the way down to the bone.

Escape Rating B: I wasn’t expecting this to be a holiday story. I just picked it up because I read ALL of this author’s work. Lo and behold, it IS a holiday story, so it fits right in with my #2025hohohorat reads! Serendipity for the WIN!

Nash Oakley has the world’s worst case of the “I’m not worthy’s”. Or he’s so wrapped up in his vision of who Georgie should be and the life she should have had that he’s initially utterly unable to deal with the woman in front of him. And I wanted to reach through my iPad and slap him with a clue-by-four for his self-serving idiocy. Because it IS self-serving and absolutely NOT Georgie-serving and he is being an idiot about it.

Not that Georgie doesn’t have her own share of problems, issues, and emotional baggage. Her attempts to get her sister out of the clutches of a serial abuser, Georgie’s ultimate failure to prevent that death along with nearly a year of chasing down every lead and walking down every blind alley in her desperate search to track her sister down in the first place steadily eroded her health, her nerves and most of all, her trust in anyone other than herself.

Her recent beating at the hands of that scumbag’s posse may fuel her resolve but also destroys her sleep with nightmares. She’s on her last nerve and everything else that goes along with it when she learns that Nash is somewhere in Vegas.

At first, he turns her down. None of his dreams of her include her walking on the dark side with him, to the point that he can’t get out of his own head to see that she’s already there. As I said, the application of a clue-by-four is required – and it gets delivered in the form of another beatdown. Nash does get his head out of his ass to run to her rescue. Finally.

Once he’s in, he’s all the way in. And so are his buddies, his fellow retired assassins who may be a bit bored with retirement but got out with at least a bit of their souls. Souls that are perfectly willing to commit an unsanctioned hit to help Nash get Georgie the vengeance – and the closure – that she’s more than earned.

Burn the World Down turned out to be a good reading time for my post-Turkey coma Thanksgiving evening, and it does a terrific job of setting up the author’s new Unsanctioned series.

One caveat that isn’t exactly fair, is that I haven’t liked most of the author’s recent series covers, and I’m not all that fond of this one, either (picture at right for comparison). OTOH, the Special Edition paperback covers have been gorgeous. I want to say that your reading mileage may vary, but the book is the same regardless of the artwork on the cover. This time around at least we get to see the cover model’s whole, entire head and face, which wasn’t true for Team 52, Norcross Security OR Sentinel Security. Perhaps I should say that ‘your ogling mileage may vary’.

Another niggle that is ‘fair’ in that it is about the story, but is probably a ‘me’ thing is that the alternating first person perspectives doesn’t work as well for me as either a single first-person POV or a third person perspective whether or not that POV is omniscient or not. Your reading mileage may definitely vary on that, but once Nash got his act together I liked his perspective more than Georgie’s.

(Ironically, on multiple counts, the trope that powers this book, older brother’s best friend crush, is the same as the trope in Snow Place Like Home, which is also an alternating first-person perspective story and I LIKED it there. So now I have to figure out whether I liked that one better because of the particular audio narrators, or just that I listened to the book instead of reading it myself, or that I liked it because the story was shorter, or whether it’s something less obvious that I need to get a handle on. C’est la reading vie and all that.)

Nevertheless, and in spite of creating a bit of a research project for myself, I’m all in on finding out what happens – or who happens – next in the Unsanctioned series. Based on the shenanigans at the very end of THIS book, the next book in the series, No Matter the Cost, will feature Bastian and the rogue assassin who keeps trying to kill him, and we’ll get to find out how THAT situation manages to work itself out sometime in January.