Reviewed by Annika
TITLE: Rack & Ruin
SERIES: THIRDS #3
AUTHOR: Charlie Cochet
NARRATOR: Mark Westfield
LENGTH: 7 hours, 6 minutes
RELEASE DATE: March 20, 2015
BLURB:
Action. Comedy. Romance. And that one weird guy.
New York City’s streets are more dangerous than ever with the leaderless Order of Adrasteia and the Ikelos Coalition, a newly immerged Therian group, at war. Innocent civilians are caught in the crossfire and although the THIRDS round up more and more members of the Order in the hopes of keeping the volatile group from reorganizing, the members of the Coalition continue to escape and wreak havoc in the name of vigilante justice.
Worse yet, someone inside the THIRDS has been feeding the Coalition information. It’s up to Destructive Delta to draw out the mole and put an end to the war before anyone else gets hurt. But to get the job done, the team will have to work through the aftereffects of the Therian Youth Center bombing. A skirmish with Coalition members leads Agent Dexter J. Daley to a shocking discovery and suddenly it becomes clear that the random violence isn’t so random. There’s more going on than Dex and Sloane originally believed, and their fiery partnership is put to the test. As the case takes an explosive turn, Dex and Sloane are in danger of losing more than their relationship.
REVIEW:
The team is still trying to stop the violence wreaking havoc in the city, but it’s not only the Order that’s in an uproar, but a newly formed Coalition of Therians are also causing trouble. And in the war between them, innocent bystanders are caught in the crossfire.
Rack & Ruin is more intense than the previous two books. It also brings a twist or two. The team is trying to stop both the Order and Coalition in any way they can, but as that wasn’t enough, they also have to find the mole within THIRDS, before they leak even more damaging information.
Dex and Sloane are more or less at the same place as they were in the previous book – relationship wise. It’s only been two months since then, so I wouldn’t expect too much to have changed, and I wouldn’t have believed in it if they did. On the other hand, I would have love to see some intimacy between them – and not the naked kind. But some quiet quality time between them would have been nice. Then again, nice and quiet might be hard to find when the city is in uproar.
I think it was Dex that called the relationships in THIRDS a bit incestuous, and he’s not wrong. Most of them are hooking up or want to hook up with each other – and most of them seem to be gay. I do love the guys, so I do want to see them all happy and settled, but at the same time there is this soap opera vibe to it.
Mark Westfield fits this story and these characters really well. I have to say that the growly voice he has for Sloane is spot on for his kind of growly personality – not that he’d agree with you though. He captures all the characters and makes you see them, feel the tension between them. He makes you invested in their lives.
I recommend having the next book in the series close at hand because this book ends on explosive terms and you’d definitely want to know what happens next.
RATING: 
BUY LINKS: