Reviewed by Cheryl
TITLE: Twisted Beauty
AUTHOR: Maggie Blackbird
PUBLISHER: Extasy Books
LENGTH: 232 Pages
RELEASE DATE: November 5, 2023
BLURB:
His community or his enemy. He can’t have both.
Deep in the badlands, Hunter patrols the area as the war chief for his Lakota community. His latest mission is to hunt down a marauder who robbed his neighbors of their precious goods. He’ll act as this man’s judge, jury, and executioner.
Having lost everything at his former Ojibway encampment, Chassis is far from home. He wanders the badlands, a grim reaper bringing death to those who possess what he needs to survive. But there is one man courageous enough to challenge him.
When the duo faces off, neither expects the sizzling chemistry to erupt between them, nor for their duel to touch what both have denied themselves. Now they must choose to either remain together and sacrifice their personal beliefs, or part ways, losing what they’ve spent their lives searching for—love.
Warning: Dubious consent and violence.
REVIEW:
The story starts with a bang and keeps its foot on the gas all the way through. As far as I know this is the author’s first attempt at speculative fiction and she’s done a great job of creating a post-apocalyptic world which she has fully fleshed without burdening us with too many unnecessary details. We understand what we need to understand and that’s enough.
As usual, her native characters are fully immersed and immersive and, despite, being set in a distant future/alternative reality, the richness of native culture has been retained and shines through.
The background is harsh, both with regard to landscape and living conditions, and the characters are shaped by their lived experience into hard men. From very different backgrounds, but cut from the same cloth, Chassis and Hunter play a dangerous game to the very last page. Their background cast works hard to keep the temperature high both in and out of the bed roll.
Although this was a high octane ride, and the author has done her usual good job of building solid characters and story, I didn’t get the same depth of detail in this book as I have in others I’ve read, and I felt that she sacrificed emotional depth for action and world building. For me, the edges were too hard, but that may well be simply personal taste.
If you like a lot of action in a dystopian setting, filled with hot men, fast cars and guns, then this is a perfect book for you. If you like something with more emotional depth them perhaps look at one of the author’s other books.
RATING: 
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