CHURCH.
Series: Church #1
Genre: Psychological Thriller
Author: Stylo Fantome
Release Date: July 20, 2018
A broken girl.
An unusual boy.
A beautiful face that hides a dark secret and an ugly past.
Sealed lips which hide wicked words and dangerous thoughts.
She would kill for him to love her.
He just wants to kill.
Maybe, if Emma Hartley prays hard enough, Church Logan can make both their wishes come true.
Fuse, meet match.
warning: if you have triggers – this story will touch on a lot of them. This book is a psychological thriller, 65,000+ words.
Maybe this whole time, I should’ve been looking for someone as fucked up as me. Maybe two broken pieces can be glued together to make a whole.
Holy hell. I mean holy hell! These might be the most fucked up characters I’ve read in a long while. Or ever. I’m still trying to figure out how I felt about them. But what I do know? Is days after finishing, I’m still thinking about it. And that certainly stands for something.
First of all, this is a psychological thriller. So if you’re going into this expecting a dark romance with an anti-hero that you’ll love to hate but still has some redeeming qualities and it’ll be sunshine and unicorns shitting rainbows at the end? Well, my friend, I’d check your delicate sensibilities at the door and forget about it. You won’t be finding it here.
What you will find are characters that are definitely missing their moral compass. As a matter of fact, they don’t even know what a moral compass is.
I don’t want to tell you too much about the plot or the characters, because I don’t want to ruin the suspense of it. And let me tell you, this book is full of it. It’s twisted and full of twists with an undercurrent of something so dark, you’re almost afraid to name it. It’s like Charles Manson meet Natural Born Killers sort of twisted.
Church was an enigma that I wanted to peel the layers off until I got to the very twisted core of him and knew all of his secrets. This is a character unlike any I’ve ever read if I’m being perfectly honest. And I flip flopped between being intrigued by him and being seriously disturbed…and then back to intrigued. This book fucked with my damn head. Which certainly speaks to the author’s talent for creating characters that will do that.
So why a lower rating? As much as I was intrigued by these characters, I also struggled to connect with them. I can’t even put my finger on what it was exactly, but something kept me from being truly invested in them. But even with that, I couldn’t stop myself from reading, and that definitely says something. With this being the first book in what I’m assuming will be a duet, perhaps that additional foundation will come a bit later, and this was just setting the scene and throwing the hook before the reader is reeled in. I fully reserve the right to change my rating once I see how it all concludes. But for now, I’ll tell you that it’s one hell of a unique story unlike any I’ve read before. If you’re looking for something dark and twisted, this is definitely that.
NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH
If you follow my reviews or know me even a little, you probably already know my love for a good alphahole? And Landon Edenhoff is in a category all of his own. This man was the alphahole to beat all alphaholes, and he makes no qualms about it. He owns it. He knows it. He even enjoys it.
Both Tori and Landon are incredibly multilayered characters that I couldn’t get enough of. Watching the development and growth of Landon was one of the most satisfying things about this book for me. I loved watching him falling harder and harder for Tori, even when he does his best to resist. He doesn’t make excuses for himself, but beneath the demons on his forefront is the heart of a man that is desperate for redemption.
