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As promised in my last post here is my next little review of a terrific thriller, Loving Vengeance by Georgia Rose.  

Loving Vengeance (The Ross Duology Book 2)  by Georgia Rose

A woman with a troubled past. A new love hanging in the balance. Will an unexpected visitor strengthen her resolve or destroy the life she’s trying to build?

Madeleine’s world, once so organised, is a mess. Suffering the fallout from the mistakes she made with Tag, she has no idea where she stands with Daniel. Are they only friends or is there still a chance for something more?

Enter James – cool, calm and calculated. A stranger, she thinks. But he knows her, and he comes with an opportunity she can’t refuse, involving an enemy she’d tried to forget. At first keen to return to her past, Madeleine soon realises it’s not only the gang that’s changed, and battles her own demons as well as an unpredictable villain.

Can Daniel step up when he’s needed? Or will it be James who rides in to the rescue? Because when things go badly for Madeleine, and all hope seems lost, there is only one who can save the day. And only one who can bring more to the task than merely himself.

Loving Vengeance is the second book in this fast-paced duology. If you like strong heroines, character-driven action and powerful emotions, then you’ll love Georgia Rose’s exciting novel.

Buy Loving Vengeance now to get to the heart of the action today!

My Review: 5 stars out of 5

A rabbi once told me it’s more important to follow the commandments than to believe in a god. If you do the former, you can’t help being a good person. If you only do the latter, you can justify all manner of sins. Maddy, the prickly heroine of Loving Vengeance, would agree with that rabbi.

Madeleine “Maddy” Ross leads a good, if somewhat boring, life. She’s friendly with her neighbors, has an unexciting job in the insurance industry, lives in a charming cottage, and is steadily easing into the life of her small village. And she doesn’t exist.

Or at least, she didn’t exist until Scarlet, running from a past where she was anything but a good person, invented her out of a need to hide from her former criminal gang, led by her ex-boyfriend. But as Scarlet forces herself to become the person she’s created, a strange and unexpected thing happens. She starts to like Maddy. She begins to care deeply for the people who care about her. She likes her new life and—scariest of all—she starts to like being the person she’s invented. And that’s dangerous. Because her new life holds villains too, and her old life wants her back.

To escape Scarlet’s past, Maddy has to navigate a path between the police detective who wants to use her, the new gang leader who intends to abuse her, and the lover who faces danger if he tries to protect her. At the same time, an uncharacteristic impulse to help one of her village neighbors has made Maddy’s new friends the targets of vicious lies, threats, and attacks.

But although still recovering from the horrific assault that ended the previous book, Maddy just doesn’t know how to give in to these demands. The perfect, multi-faceted solution she comes up with puts her in danger, results in her being attacked, wounded, and trapped. To Maddy, that part is fine, even expected. But—in possibly the best twist in any of author Georgia Rose’s twisty scenarios—it’s a threat to her fragile, terrifying new feelings of love and affection that finally sends cool, calculating Maddy off the emotional cliff.

It’s one of her trademarks that Georgia Rose’s thrillers use extensive character development to build slowly, and this two-book series is no exception. The first book, Parallel Lies, left us with Maddy battered but poised to commit to her new life. In my review, I basically berated the author for not giving us more. (There may have been whining. And threats. Don’t judge me.) Luckily, she came through. In this sequel, both the new life Maddy is poised to embrace and the old one she can’t leave behind conspire to destroy the carefully crafted new identity that has become so real to her.

In some ways, this is a satisfying crime caper, complete with the moral dissonance that has us automatically cheering on the “good” guys about to commit what would technically be called felonies. Their meticulous plans to steal, sting, and generally destroy their enemies are fine with us because the bad guys are really mean. There are high-tech gadgets, split-second timing, good guys in danger, safes to be broken, and chase scenes.

This time, I’m more than satisfied with the ending, especially with Maddy’s final twist. As I said about the last book, for those who admire character-driven thrillers, who can handle brief but shocking violence, and who enjoy beautiful writing, I can’t recommend both books in this series enough.

        • Book Title: Loving Vengeance (The Ross Duology Book 2)
        • Author: Georgia Rose
        • Genre: Romantic Thriller
        • Publisher: Three Shires Publishing (13 Oct. 2019)
        • Length: 268 pages