A review by thewordslinger
Lethal Rider by Larissa Ione

3.0

I don't know how to rate this book. It took me quite a long time to get into it. Usually, these kinds of things take me a day or two to power through, and they're really entertaining... but I had a serious mental block with this one, given the way Thanatos and his love interest began their supremely fucked up relationship. I didn't see how the two could turn things around because there was nothing but abuse going on between them--abuse that began in the book before this one.

Spoiler

I very much dislike how the rape (because that's what it fucking was) was excused away on the wine they'd been drugged with. It felt like a cop out to me, a brushing aside of an insanely serious and triggering topic. And what followed--the Münchhausen Syndrome they both sort of suffered at the other's hands... I still waffle on whether or not the book redeemed them by the end of it.

It's sad that I'm so lukewarm on this book, because even in the very first novel in this series, Thanatos was my favorite of the Horsemen. Ione, in my opinion, did him dirty. And I'm just not convinced everything's all hunky-dory now that his story has finished.

This is a generous 3 stars from me. And most of those points were earned not by the 2 main characters but by the plot and the other stuff that went down in the novel. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯