REVIEWED by Jen B.
TITLE: Vice City
SERIES: Vice City #1
AUTHOR: S.A. Stovall
PUBLISHER: Dreamspinner Press
LENGTH: 234 Pages
RELEASE DATE: June 20, 2017
BLURB: After twenty years as an enforcer for the Vice family mob, Nicholas Pierce shouldn’t bat an eye at seeing a guy get worked over and tossed in the river. But there’s something about the suspected police mole, Miles, that has Pierce second-guessing himself. The kid is just trying to look out for his brother any way he knows how, and the altruistic motive sparks an uncharacteristic act of mercy that involves Pierce taking Miles under his wing.
Miles wants to repay Pierce for saving his life. Pierce shouldn’t see him as anything but a convenient hookup… and he sure as hell shouldn’t get involved in Miles’s doomed quest to get his brother out of a rival street gang. He shouldn’t do a lot of things, but life on the streets isn’t about following the rules. Besides, he’s sick of being abused by the Vice family, especially Mr. Vice and his power-hungry goon of a son, who treats his underlings like playthings.
So Pierce does the absolute last thing he should do if he wants to keep breathing—he leaves the Vice family in the middle of a turf war.
JEN B.’S REVIEW:
This story grabbed me right away. It had a certain feel to it, almost like the movie, Sin City, which is based on a graphic novel. It is gritty and dark, and the way it is written, makes you feel like you are watching the story as it is being told to you. I would not normally be a fan of this type of storytelling, but it fit this story so well that it ended up being one of the things I loved about it.
The story begins with Miles in a bad situation getting beat up by mafia thugs who believed he was a mole. Nicholas Pierce was one of those thugs, but he saw something in Miles that didn’t sit well with him, so he managed to diffuse the situation and basically saved his life. The more time he spent with Miles, the more it became clear that he was caught up in a mess he shouldn’t be in, all in the hopes of saving his brother who was involved with a rival gang.
Miles and Pierce grow closer together, but Pierce is stuck in a trap of being the enforcer to the head of the crime family. Unfortunately, there are other players looking to take over, and Pierce is caught with trying to carry out his orders keeping both the father and the son happy, though it quickly becomes apparent that those coincide and not in a good way.
Pierce wants out and has been trying to figure out a way to make that happen. Especially now that he has Miles, someone to protect and love, he thinks he can get them away if he just hangs on long enough. But that power struggle in the gang/mafia gets in the way and things get very precarious. Luckily, Miles doesn’t give up and makes things happen in a big way when it counts.
This was a super intense, high energy story that kept me on the edge of my seat. I wanted Pierce and Miles to make it so badly but was also having trouble figuring out how it could be accomplished. I was so glad to know this was the first book of the series, because I was definitely not ready to be finished with this world or these characters and can’t wait for the next installment.
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Does it end with a cliffhanger?
No, it has a definite ending, just room to continue within a series. :3