Rating: 2 stars
Buy Link:
Amazon | iBooks | Amazon UK
Length: Novel


Owen and Dex were ready to get married, but when Owen’s drug addiction got to be too much for Dex to handle, Dex finally left him. Now Owen, is homeless, unemployed, and stealing to support the pills he craves.

Dex has not been able to move on from Owen, however. He loved Owen, but he didn’t recognize him anymore and Owen refused to get help. When Owen is injured, Dex is called. Dex has no intention of getting back together with Owen, but the pull between the men is strong and Owen will have to conquer his addiction if there is hope of the men rebuilding their relationship.

This was one of those books that I knew was not going to work for me early on. When the book opens, we are in Dex’s POV and he was fairly irritating to me. While I didn’t care for his thought process, the style of writing overall was simplistic in an unpleasant way, relied at times on clichés, read as dated for the age of the characters, and felt forced as it didn’t have a natural flow for inner dialogues and conversation.

The set up for their story did not work for me either. We meet Dex and Owen in the prologue when they meet each other as well. We do not see anything of their relationship and years have passed and they are no longer together. The book then moves to flashbacks and dreams to fill in only a little bit of their story and I never felt like I knew the characters. Since there was no history built to their relationship, there was no connection built to root for them to get back together. There was also little sense of place for the story other than they were near a beach and it was difficult for me to become immersed in their story.

We are only shown Owen as he is addicted to drugs. There is no backstory built for him and we are not told anything about what leads up to his addiction, until a few lines from a friend at the end of the book. But as far as from Owen, we only see him needing his next pill and then making bad choices because of it. The story then reads as predictable as Owen gets into trouble and Dex can’t stay away and there was little depth attached to what we were told Owen went thorough.

This storyline itself is one I like to read, but I needed much more in every area to engage me based on this topic and, while I do enjoy trying a newer author, this was not a good fit.