*Please note that the below review does contain spoilers pertaining to books one and two in the Pierced Hearts series. You can find our previous reviews for Take Me, Break Me and Bind and Keep Me here and here.

MICHAEL’S TAKE

Title: Make Me Yours Evermore
Author: Cari Silverwood
Publisher: Cari Silverwood
ISBN: 9781311900234

Okay, in Take Me, Break Me, we meet Jodie and Klaus when she comes up with a money-making scheme: Have Klaus hold her captive for a month, film the whole thing, and release it to fame and fortune. In the end, things go a bit awry but they achieve a kind of working balance in their relationship.

Skip ahead a year and we get to Bind and Keep Me. When Jodie attends a wild party and dies, Klaus kills the man responsible. Only Jodie isn’t dead. And rather than either hope the police don’t figure out what happened or even try to explain what happened, Klaus comes up with a unique solution: kidnap the one witness who can expose his secret. And hold her captive for the rest of their lives. Perhaps not the greatest plan ever, but it has worked so far. Mostly.

Which brings us up to Make Me Yours Evermore. One of the mostly wrinkles is that Kat has figured out something weird is going on. We actually met Kat at the end of the TMBM. As a character, she was kind of annoying. The other characters thought so too. She still doesn’t know precisely what is going on, but she is going to find out. Only Chris, Klaus’ business partner, is determined to stop her. Because it turns out that Chris has always had a secret fantasy: To kidnap someone and hold her captive for the rest of their lives. And so to help out Klaus, Chris volunteers to do that to Kat.

Oh, and just for fun he brings along his groupie. Years ago, Chris saved Andreas from a shark attack. So anything Chris wants to do is okay by him. All I can say is I am glad that Chris wasn’t into unleashing global thermonuclear war. And actually, it turns out that Andreas has a secret fantasy as well. You guessed it? To hold a woman captive for the rest of her life. I am sensing a theme.

So, anyway, if you aren’t in love with Chris already, he also has a somewhat less-pleasant secret. For years, Chris has been doing the books for a criminal enterprise – something that apparently our boy Klaus didn’t even know about. And just what sort of criminal enterprise? Why, human trafficking, of course. And so his buddies have set him up with a place where he can unleash his Big Bad Dom Self and learn wayward little Kat who her True Master is. He is quite confident that within a month he can have her molded into the submissive little slave girl of his dreams.

Around this point I was thinking if this was an episode of an American TV show, Kat would manipulate Chris and Andreas into a jealous rage over who would possess her and end up stepping over their dead bodies as she walked off into the sunset at the end. Fortunately, though, while there is an element of that, Cari came up with something far more original.

I don’t really want to spoil the latter part because honestly I didn’t really see it coming. What I will say is that going into this sort of novel I am always curious about one thing: Can the captor actually “break” his victim and do it for me in a believable way? I found the ending believable but I think Chris may not have achieved the result he was looking for.

Because, really, at the end of the last novel there was one person who could be Klaus’ undoing. At the beginning of this one, we were up to two. Now we actually have five. All it will take is just one Charles Ramsey and a whole lot of people are going to jail.

This is one series where just when you think you have an idea where things are going, things head off on a tangent. I am very curious to see where we go next but, as I said at the end of Bind and Keep Me, I am making no predictions.

Tickle your fancy? Click on the following links to purchase a copy.

Amazon.co.uk

• Make Me Yours Evermore – Kindle

Amazon.com

• Make Me Yours Evermore – Kindle

*Please note that a copy of Make Me Yours Evermore was provided free of charge by the author in exchange for a fair review.

The post Make Me Yours Evermore, Part Deux: The Michael Chronicles appeared first on Behind the Chintz Curtain.

At one point, Chris, a character in Make Me Yours Evermore, mentions brain bleach. By the end of the book, I was surreptitiously checking supermarket shelves for a bottle of the stuff.

Redemption? Remorse? Morality?

Phtt.

Love?

Wash your mouth out.

This book is about lust, desire, control and corruption. But, above all else, it’s about power. Held absolutely and resolutely over another human being. Consensual? No. But compelling and intoxicating, nonetheless.

I can’t recall a single time I’ve ‘enjoyed’ (not to be confused with ‘been impressed by’) a book featuring a core protagonist I was unable to like, empathise with, or warm to. But in this particular case, I did.

Chris is a sadist who’s been waiting for the perfect opportunity to cross the line. And he’s no paragon of virtue in other areas of his life, either. Andreas is a man with some naughty little fantasies who gets a taste of the forbidden and all too quickly strays from the path of righteousness. To my shame, I found myself coming to terms with these two men – one of whom was devoid of any redeeming qualities whatsoever and the other who, despite starting on slightly higher moral ground, very quickly succumbed to the allure of a body available to his every sexual whim. Why, you may ask, did I find these two men … acceptable (if that’s really the word) given my distaste for their actions? It’s simple, really. They were contrasted against a silo of darker, more infinitely abhorrent human beings. Well, that and they tapped into a Pandora’s Box of dark fantasies.

Being forced to submit.

Being humiliated.

Being made to crawl.

Surrendering yourself absolutely – whether you want to or not.

I should make very clear at this point there is a definite S/m thread running through Make Me Yours Evermore. However – and this is really important – I’d in no way class it as a BDSM book. It is not safe or sane. Nor is it risk aware or consensual. The best way I can describe it is as a darkly kinky head-screw that’s not afraid to dig around in the murkier parts of the human psyche and throw a bit of dirt. As with Take Me, Break Me and Bind and Keep Me, Make Me Yours Evermore takes the reader on an unapologetic journey to the dark side. What’s more, it coerces them into enjoying it. If you’re at all uncomfortable with letting your mind wander along darker paths in the name of erotic fantasy then this is – cue flashing warning lights, sirens, etc. – most definitely not the book for you. With each Pierced Hearts instalment, the stakes just seem to get higher and higher, the situations more edgy. And that’s saying something considering Take Me, Break Me kicked off with non-consensual play. Yep. Say ‘hello’ to organised crime, forced slavery, and human trafficking. David Cameron would no doubt – and please excuse the crudity – sh*t a brick if he read this.

Just in case it’s not clear from the rest of this review, the thought of any of the events in the Pierced Hearts series happening in real life flat out appals me. Kink without consent, murder, kidnapping; I am not for one nanosecond condoning any of these things outside of fiction. No way. But I’d be lying if I said the scenarios Cari Silverwood has dreamed up didn’t push my buttons in an erotic fantasy context. Despite my guilty feelings, I’ve been well and truly seduced by her dark little tales. Make Me Yours Evermore is no exception.  

Next time, though? I’d like the characters’ emotional connections to be more … pronounced. Extreme. Because while the plotting, scene-setting and sex were excellent – I’m still recovering from the encounter in the forest between Kat, Andreas and Chris – I found myself yearning for a cataclysmic, no-holds-barred, sexual and emotional kick in the guts to really hammer this story home and cement the characters. Truthfully, I’m still not entirely sure where they stand with one another.

Tickle your fancy? Click on the following links to purchase a copy:

Amazon.co.uk

• Make Me Yours Evermore – Kindle

Amazon.com

• Make Me Yours Evermore – Kindle

*Please note that a copy of Make Me Yours Evermore was provided free of charge by the author in exchange for a fair review.

The post Make Me Yours Evermore – Cari Silverwood appeared first on Behind the Chintz Curtain.