Reviewed by Dan

Warning: This book contains graphic and brutal violence, including detailed murder scenes, graphic male rape and repeated beatings. It also contains references to underage male prostitution.

TITLE:    Driven

AUTHOR:     Nicholas Kinsley

PUBLISHER:  Forbidden Fiction

LENGTH:     248 Pages

BLURB:

Mitchell Morgan is a quiet young man with dangerous secrets. One of those secrets is a psychic power over metal that makes him far more than just the handsome, blue-eyed owner of Advanced Auto Repairs. The other traps him in a world of organized crime and intense violence. Trevor Lewis is a graphic designer with a passion for drawing, drumming, and his incredibly hot auto mechanic. He meets Mitchell over a broken tail light, and despite—or perhaps because of—Trevor’s awkwardness, Mitchell is charmed. Trevor’s curly hair and brilliant smile bring light into Mitchell’s complicated world. Mitchell would do anything to save Trevor from the dangers of his criminal life—but first Trevor has to save Mitchell from his own darkness. (M/M)

REVIEW:

I’m going to be honest. I’m not going blow smoke and say that I liked this book. There were parts of it that were OK, but there were parts that were not. The parts that were not OK overshadowed the rest by far. I’m going to have some spoilers in this review because I want you to understand why I’m going rate the book so low.

When this book showed up on our list for reviews, I read the blurb, saw “handsome…blue-eyed…hot auto mechanic” meets “graphic designer…awkward.” Throw in the psychic power and maybe some secret ties to organized crime and it sounded really good. Based on the Pontiac Grand Am on the cover, I assumed it would be set somewhere in the US. (It wasn’t.)

What also wasn’t covered in the blurb was that there was a Gender Queer character that needed to be addressed as they, them and themselves. I didn’t have an issue with the character, who ended up being a minor character anyway, but it was confusing as it was my first experience with a Gender Queer character and the need for non-gender pronouns. I’ll admit I learned something from the character of Kay, but Kay seemed to have been written in for political correctness reasons, and didn’t really have anything to do with the overall story.

The second thing that wasn’t covered in the blurb was that Mitchell was from Liverpool, and he and his mother’s dialog was written in the Scouse accent of Liverpool. I literally had to read those sections out loud to puzzle out what was being said. I thought that was a detail that could easily have been left out, because to me it didn’t make those sections more realistic…it just made them annoying as hell.

The third thing that was not covered was that Mitchell is an executioner for an organized crime boss. We are told it isn’t his choice, but when he stabbed someone repeatedly with a switchblade…prior to slicing the man’s throat open and then holding his body up while the blood gushed out of his wound and the victim tried to hold the blood in with his hands…and then when the blood slowed he pushed the guy onto the muddy ground and watched him breathing his last…it was pretty far over the top, even for me.

By the time it got to Mitchell being brutally raped from both ends by the mob boss and his right hand man…after they had just beaten him severely…and then the scene ended with a third man pissing on him as he lay there on the office floor afterwards, I’ll admit it…I was pretty much done.

I make it a point to always finish what I started, and I knew no one at our blog would even slightly want to pick up this book if I walked away from it, so I decided to finish it…which I did, this morning.

In my opinion, this book should have come with a much more extensively written blurb, complete with strong content warnings. I’m the guy at our blog who usually reads the darker stuff we get in, so the dark content in this book I was able to handle easily enough. But that said, it doesn’t mean I liked it very much.

Unless you are into graphic violence, I would recommend you give this book a pass. Mr. Kinsley did a good job with developing the darkness and flaws in his two MCs. I think it could have been a much better book if he had kept going in that direction, instead of bringing some of the things mentioned above onto the pages of his book. I’m going to have to give the book a rating of 1.5 out of 5.0 stars. I personally didn’t like it and it was not for me.

RATING:

BUY LINKS: 

Forbidden Fiction

Amazon

ARe