This review is from 2015 and is kept here for reference. Titles, prices and availability may have changed.
Tessa Bailey
Book ArchiveContemporarySuspenseMolten
NYPD detective Seraphia Newsom will avenge her brother’s death at any cost. Even if it means insinuating herself into a rough, Brooklyn street gang and going so far undercover, she’s not sure she’ll be able to get out. Every minute she spends in their midst means the clock ticking down on her life, especially when she overhears something that could get her killed.
Bowen Driscol is the heir to a crime enterprise. He never asked for the job, but with his father behind bars, he has no choice but to step in and keep the operation running. But when the NYPD blackmails him with a piece of damning information in exchange for aiding an undercover cop, he finds himself on the other side of the law for the first time in his life.
Bowen knows the danger Sera is in, and keeping her safe trumps saving his own ass. The problem? She can’t know he’s on her side. And there's the matter of the seriously inconvenient heat sparking between them that's incinerating his resistance. But Sera only sees Bowen's past, and men like him are the reason her brother is dead. If they're to get out alive, he'll have to risk exposing the man beneath, and hope to hell he doesn't blow the whole operation in the process.
In Risking it All, Tessa Bailey departs from her usual beach-reads to something grittier and deeper, but keeps her signature sexy style. She keeps the crime storyline moving while developing the star-crossed love story between Bowen and Seraphina. Bowen is a bad boy, like bad-to-the-bone, nurse-turned-undercover-cop Seraphina Newsom is the sweetest of the sweet. Tessa brings the two together in a combustible combination of chemistry and intrigue. The twists keep the pages turning and you’re kept guessing until the very end.
Dark. Dirty. Gritty. That about sums it up. Bowen is the baddest of the bad boys and I freaking LOVE HIM!! Everything about him. Sera is the light to his dark. Total opposites that fit together perfectly. We get it all…Mystery, suspense, heat. And NO ONE does heat quite like Tessa. Bowen might be her dirtiest mouth yet and couldn’t get enough.
In Tessa Bailey’s books, good doesn’t fight evil; they succumb to the magnetic forces she perfectly crafts for heart-pounding, swoon-worthy scenes. Risking It All gives us the best of good versus evil, only in the end, we all win (and my panties lose).[January 2015]
What we didn’t
- How can you love a man that was born to run a crime empire? Let me tell you how: Tessa sucks you in with her characters, showing their weaknesses and fallibility and what they will do to come out on top with the love of another person. Poor Bowen, born into a life he didn’t want and though he wants Sera for himself, he knows if he touches her, he’ll stain her purity. And pure she is, right down to going to church every Sunday, crossing herself when cursing . . . and having no sexual experience. Don’t worry, Bowen more than makes up for it with his dirty talking, in and out of the bedroom.
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