Title: A Lovely Obsession (Debt Of Passion Duet #1)
Author: Coralee June
Release Date: February 10, 2020
★★★★ (Subject to change based on sequel - Stay Tuned)
** Kindle Unlimited
My guardian angel is a devil in disguise. He hates me. He protects me.
He watches me.
My stalker is obsessed with keeping me safe. He calls me his prettiest debt.
An assassin in the notorious Bullet gang, he uses his empire to control my life. Everything I know is a lie.
What started as a debt turned into something more. What started as regret turned into obsession.
Ambition is his muse and I am his conscience. Our past may bind us together, but his enemies will tear us apart.
My guardian angel is a devil in disguise.
He hates me. He protects me.
And I think I love him.
As I sit here, really digging into how I feel about this book, I feel like I should probably underscore that I read this book because I've gone down a particular rabbit hole and in general, I feel like that rabbit hole isn't necessarily for me. BUT. I think this book is evidence that when an author handles super dark subject matter in a really human way, I can be be really satisfied by it.
While this book deals with some pretty dark and heavy subject matter, I think the backstories and histories of both of the main characters are so well fleshed out that the ways that they're both individually damaged and the way it twists them towards each other makes perfect sense.
Roe is a really fascinating character, with walls so high and so hard that as soon as someone tries to scale them she runs away. Sometimes characters like her really bother me because I don't think their trauma justifies their damage, which might seem judgmental but honestly... I've seen some doozies and they tend to be really sloppily presented and end up in the DNF pile pretty quick. Roe, as a character, has been crafted in such a way that her defenses and protective instincts make perfect sense and ultimately her actions throughout the book, even ones that could seem pretty much insane, just make sense. I think I might spend a little too much time dissecting whether characters make sense to me, but it really is super important to my reading experience.
I wasn't entirely sure how I was going to feel about Hunter through a good portion of the book because it takes us a while to get to his backstory and past his sort of guarded mysteriousness, but in the end I feel like he was also really, really well crafted and I really liked him. Without spoiling it, his actions at the very end of the book are probably the thing that really drove home just how much I like him and can't wait to see what his arc is like in book 2.
This should have been creepy, it really should have. So much of the subject matter tends to be on my no list when it comes to romance, but the way that it was plotted and the pacing and the crafting of the characters kept it in a place that just made sense to me and made me root for the characters. I keep comparing it to similar books I've read recently that have left me feeling... sort of dirty and uncomfortable when I finished them, but when I finished this I really felt like it was a satisfying read and I couldn't wait to see the next one.
Sometimes I find the whole duet thing frustrating and unnecessary, but I think in this case it was absolutely warranted. The author ended the book with something about how they both needed to grow and because of their really solid characterization I loved that. It would have been really easy to try and wrap this story up with a bow and I know I would have been unsatisfied by that, so I can't wait to see what the sequel brings for these two characters and how their arcs continue.
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