Reviewed by Taylin
TITLE: Heart Thief
SERIES: Blood Brother’s #1
AUTHOR: Skylar Sweeney
PUBLISHER: Self Published
LENGTH: 292 pages
RELEASE DATE: Jan 15, 2022
BLURB:
They say love conquers all, but is it more powerful than revenge?
MASON
A decade ago, Rex stole my little brother’s heart in a literal sense, and I’ve never forgiven him for taking my best friend’s transplant. When peeing on his doorstep and breaking into his house to leave rubber snakes behind doesn’t quench my thirst for vengeance, I decide to take things to another level by stealing his new replacement for the heart that is failing once more. But if I’d known ahead of time that Rex used to kill people for living, I might have thought twice about my plans…
REX
I know what it’s like to live on the dark side, and there’s nothing I love more than watching Mason, my beautiful good boy with a vengeance, try to play bad. When he infiltrates my company, I’m perfectly happy with the idea of my best frenemy as my new assistant, stealing my heart away… at least until I realize the love of my life is actually after the heart transplant that I need to survive.
REVIEW:
After losing his brother, Mason vowed vengeance on Rex, the man he believed was accountable. While plotting Rex’s downfall, Mason becomes the man’s assistant. Rex is part of a brotherhood that is scary as !!!. While Rex is reputed to be a playboy, his games are decidedly different from the imagination of most. He knows Mason has an agenda, yet he can’t help but see what plays out.
Somehow, the subject of assassins doesn’t seem like it should have a comedic edge, but it does in this story. It’s all levels of morally wrong, especially given some of the subject matters within the arc, but the sass and banter give it an upbeat charm that kept me turning the page and liking characters that think nothing of killing people.
Heart Thief is told in the first person from the viewpoints of Mason and Rex. Technically, it wasn’t bad, but it is a remastered novel, so it could have been better. There are quite a few instances of autonomous body parts – mainly with the eyes. If you’re going to make a statement akin to ‘my eyes did X or ‘my eyebrows did Y,’ then it needs to be qualified. E.g. ‘as if they had a will of their own, my eyes….’; else it comes across as the body part working independently of the brain, which is a no, no, within editing circles.
Mason has a super snarky personality that comes through in everything – I loved that aspect. In the early chapters, he demonstrates some understandable hate that I wasn’t sure could be combatted, and I was firmly in camp Mason. After all, he’s an innocent with a grudge, and Rex almost has no moral compass. However, as you probably got the vibe from above, Rex and his band of ‘brothers’ are so quirky that they reminded me of the line from Disney’s, The Secret Life Of Pets, where the angelic cats say ‘We Start Fires’. Shout-out here to Valentine.
As part of the online blurb, the author states that this, and the series, were previously published as M/F stories’ but that they were initially intended to be M/M. While admirable that the stories’ published past was advertised, in some ways, I wish it wasn’t because it meant that I was on the lookout for the converted areas, as will other readers. There are several instances where m/f comes across more than m/m. I am aware that Skylar Sweeney is a gender-fluid gay man, and it is an author’s prerogative to write a character in whatever vision they have. However, while I am all for gender-fluid characters – given the situation, I feel there needed to be more distinction between the two variations of the novel.
So, while I loved the sass, arc, action, and almost everything else about Heart Thief, because of the story’s previous life, I’d have liked more differences between Mason and his female counterpart. It would have negated any comparison between the two novels. For this reason, the story gets a lower rating than it probably deserves.
RATING: 
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