Reviewed by Carissa
TITLE: Inked Souls
SERIES: Scarred Souls #2
AUTHOR: T.T. Kove
PUBLISHER: Less Than Three Press
LENGTH: 46,000 words
BLURB:
Kian didn’t anticipate being dragged along while his friend got a tattoo as anything but a waste of time. Then he meets Silver, a handsome tattoo artist who provokes all sort of x-rated thoughts and ambitions. More intriguing, Silver’s been waiting for a chance to get to know Kian.
A relationship wasn’t what Kian was expecting when they fall into bed, but he’s not opposed. But the beginning of a relationship is the easy part, it’s everything after that’s a challenge—especially when the danger of disease and infection enter the picture.
REVIEW:
This story runs mostly concurrently with Scarred Souls, the previous book in the series. Though I don’t think you need to have read book one to get this story, I would say that you might want to anyways. It is a lot heavier in tone then this book, though, so you might want to also take that into consideration.
Here in Inked Souls, we get to see the entirety of Kian and Silver’s story. And baring a few bits of tension and uncertainty, it is a pretty easy-going story.
Which might have been it’s biggest weakness. A lot of the drama in this story comes from Damian and Josh (the MCs from book one), and since I’ve already read their story I kinda didn’t feel all that connected to those parts of the book. This is my biggest problem with stories that do the whole “rerun thru another perspective” thing. Nothing in this story is a real surprise (except maybe Silver’s back-story). Don’t get me wrong, it was still enjoyable to read, and Kian and Silver are supper sweet together, but there was no real hook for me.
Now for the things that I did like and made this a book worth reading:
Kian–who has the main POV in this story–is a great character. He is sweet and a bit uncertain at times, but there is also a lot of passion in him. Watching him struggle thru the whole health scare you can really start to see how his mom’s lack of any real parenting has affected him, but also how his dad his new family has begun to heal him.
The tattoos–which I’m a big fan of, but have always been too much a wimp to actually get any–are awesome. And Kian’s reaction to seeing Silver giving someone a tattoo was hilarious. Very inopportune boners going on here.
I also really liked the various family dynamics in this story. All them felt equally believable in there own way, be it for better or for worse.
Overall, while the repeated time-line kinda made it hard for me to really get into, I did still enjoy it. And the bonus short story at the end, featuring Damian and Josh, was just great.
RATING:
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