Recently this pedometer geek read the novel, Dangerous Alliance by Kyra Davis. I received it as a First Reads Goodreads giveaway. It happens to be the second book in the Pure Sin series. The first book in this two-book series is Deceptive Innocence, which was read after the second one was completed. Although it was easy enough to understand what was going on in the second without reading the first, I suggest not doing this.* Because I read the second one first, I already had an idea of the gist of its storyline and thus, Deceptive Innocence was a bit ruined for me. The suspense of getting to know the characters was lost; hence this pedometer geek’s post will briefly review both of them in the order they should be read. Furthermore, the emphasis will be on Dangerous Alliance.
Dangerous Alliance
By Kyra Davis
Published by Pocket Books,
A division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7426-8
Both Dangerous Alliance and Deceptive Innocence are contemporary suspenseful romance novels that feature Bellona (Adoncia) as a revenge-seeking woman who intends to make the men of the Gable family pay for the loss of her mother to suicide after being incarcerated for the murder of her lover, Nick Foley.
In Deceptive Innocence, the reader discovers Adoncia, who introduces herself as Bell (as in Bellona, the goddess of war). Playing an innocent bartender, she seduces her way into the life (and bed) of the younger Gable son, Lander. He is handsome, rich, intelligent, and hot. It is through this connection that she figures she can learn the secrets and truth that will take down this family of bankers and thus find justice for her mother and herself.
However, she doesn’t bank on the sexual chemistry she has with Lander. This makes Lander seem less like an enemy; thus she needs her memories of her mother to keep up the wall of anger so that she can investigate him, his brother Travis, and his father Edmund further.
Taking a job as a personal assistant to Jessica and Travis adds to the tension of the story, yet for Bell, it is another necessary step to get closer to her goal of taking down the Gable family.
Dangerous Alliance takes up the story directly after Bell and Lander have forged an alliance, albeit a dangerous one. While their individual motivations may not be quite the same, they have similar goals. In Bell’s case, she continues the machinations she put into place in the preceding novel. Lander acts in a similar manner. As a pair, they are trying to connect Travis and Edmund to her mother’s murder conviction and subsequent death as well as prove their involvement in corrupt banking practices.
Their chemistry, in and out of bed, continues, and they plot and plan, which makes them a formidable team. For Adoncia, she wants nothing less than to have them jailed, but Lander is more indirect in his wishes, which eventually ratchets up the tension between the pair.
Add to that, tensions with Travis, tensions with Jessica, and tensions with various other baddies make for a suspenseful read. Further, the story is interspersed with erotically-charged scenes between Adonica and Lander. Whether or not Adoncia will achieve her goals keeps the reader guessing until the very end. This, too, is true of the romance between Lander and Adoncia as they wrestle with their individual demons.
The two Pure Sin series novels were the first of Kyra Davis’s novels this pedometer geek has read, but I doubt that these will be the last as I found them quite engaging (and without many of the WTT trends normally seen).
* In the course of reading Dangerous Alliance, I was contacted by the author via Twitter (Ah, the power of social media, but I digress.) that I was reading the second one and that it might be difficult to enjoy it as much, and that I really should have read Deceptive Innocence first. While I really appreciated this advice, I was already halfway through the story and decided to finish it before tackling the first. Consider this a warning.