*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.

Title:

Two words: still recovering. Bind and Keep Me is non-con BDSM erotica at its absolute best. If you like your tales dark, you’re not going to want to miss this one.

*You can click on any of the stick figure drawings below to make them bigger. Which many of you will likely need to do if your eyesight is as bad as mine and you can’t read the writing!

JANE’S TAKE

This book should come with a health warning:

Caution! Jaw may drop to floor and disconnect from face. The author assumes no responsibility for readers who spontaneously combust with arousal and/or spend days wondering whether their moral compass needs resetting as a result of reading (and enjoying) this book.

Leave your sanity at the door because there is absolutely no way that Bind and Keep Me can be put into either the Safe, Sane and Consensual (SSC) or Risk Aware Consensual Kink (RACK) buckets. There is unsafe play in spades. There is insane play by the truckload. There is non-consent to the power of a hundred overlaid with the veneer of incredibly dubious consent. There is risk with a capital ‘R’. And there is kink. Oh, man is there kink.

But the scary thing is that it works. Almost too well. So well that you come out the other end of this book and think ‘I’m one twisted individual for enjoying that. And wanting more.’

A sadist who’s completely off the chain? Check.

Thoroughly illegal activity (murder-slash-manslaughter and abduction)? Check.

A ‘victim’ who has absolutely no say, no outs, no choice in what is done to her? Check, check, check.

Why is it that this book is so deliciously frightening? Because it feels so believable. You could actually imagine the scenario it describes happening. Cari Silverwood has taken everyday characters and situations and completely run them through the twisted kinky wringer to create something that is, pardon my language, a thoroughly arousing mind f*ck. (Let me assure you, you will never look at accountant in quite the same way.)

I was expecting a continuation of Klaus and Jodie’s story, which began in Take Me, Break Me. What I got was a tale that took me on a totally unexpected right-angle and went far deeper and darker than it’s predecessor. And as I read, I could not get out of my mind the following passage from that first book, the one in which Klaus truly begins to understand just how far his sadistic desires go:

‘My new epiphany turned creepy cold. Sharing hadn’t been last on the list, killing her and burying her on the beach had been it. Christ. Thank God, I wasn’t that man, but it made me wonder who I had become. I doubted I could change back.’

So just how far will his desires push him to take things in Bind and Keep Me?

To the limit, people. To the limit.

And what can I say about the ending? I’d have thought that Klaus would be a pretty hard act to follow but reading the Bind and Keep Me epilogue, it seems Ms Silverwood is going to crank things up even further with the next Pierced Hearts entry; Chris frightens the cr*p out of me – but oh, hell, do I want to read about him …

MICHAEL’S TAKE

I’ve decided to keep this review as spoiler-free as possible.

So after Jane and I read Take Me, Break Me a few months ago I learned that there was a second book in the Pierced Hearts series. At first I was confused but then I remembered that there were several possible supporting characters who could be featured in the next story.

So when Jane sent me the Bind and Keep Me review copy, I just picked it up and started reading. And found that it featured Jodie and Klaus. I was surprised, obviously, but decided to just go with it and see where we ended up.

And then … Boom! I didn’t see that coming.

What Cari had to do was tricky. Add a third character to the mix. Create someone who was likeable enough that we did care what happened to her. And yet at the same time make her unlikable enough that we didn’t get too upset at what she went through. I think she pretty much succeeded.

I am still trying to process the ending. Did I see it coming? I definitely saw it as a possibility earlier but had kind of eliminated that from the list by the time it happened. How do I feel about it? Honestly, I am still kind of unsure.

I gave Klaus a lot of leeway and the benefit of the doubt the first time around. Truth? He scares me more than a bit now. I am not sure where he is going to draw the line anymore.

Is there room for a third book? Actually, there is. I am not going to make any assumptions next time around, though.

*Please note that advance copies of Bind and Keep Me were supplied free of charge by the author in exchange for a fair review.

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

Amazon.co.uk

• Bind and Keep Me – Kindle

Amazon.com

• Bind and Keep Me – Kindle

The post Bind and Keep Me – Cari Silverwood appeared first on Behind the Chintz Curtain.

Anyway the other day, Michael and I received a fantastic surprise: Take Me, Break Me will soon be released in paperback and guess whose words will be appearing on the cover? Yup. Mr M’s.

Cari, we cannot be anything other than utterly thrilled and flattered – especially since we’re in the fine quotation company of Club Shadowlands goddess Cherise Sinclair. It’s a huge honour to be featured on your book in this way and we can’t thank you enough for acknowledging us.

Now [taps foot impatiently] – when can we expect the next instalment in the Pierced Hearts series? Because, you know, those stick figures want an encore …

The post Take us and Break us: we’re on Cari’s cover! appeared first on Behind the Chintz Curtain.

Title:

Yep. As requested, Michael and I are back once again as a book-reviewing double act. Are we less ranty than last time? I think so. But I still ended up drawing stick figures. Couldn’t seem to stop myself. He, meanwhile, took the high road and included intelligent and insightful quotes. (I think it’s clear which of us is Batman and which of us is Robin in this instance …)

JANE’S TAKE …

Before I say anything else, I just want to make it clear that I liked this book. The story was interesting, the characters likeable, and the sex hot. (Very, very hot in fact.) But it disturbed me. And I felt bad for enjoying it at times.

I’m a bit of a fan of both the non-con and D/s genres when it comes to erotica. But I see them as very separate things and when they start getting tangled together in a work of fiction, sirens, alarm bells and all manner of other emergency service warning systems start going off in my head. Consent is fundamental to BDSM. Always. And if it’s not? Well, that’s abuse. Plain and simple. As a rule, I will immediately stop reading books that portray non-consensual interactions between characters as D/s or S/M. Take Me, Break Me, however, managed to twist all the traditional rules of engagement.

The premise is intriguing. Jodie wants to make a documentary about living through the experience of a capture fantasy and asks her ex-boyfriend, Klaus, to imprison her in the basement of her house for the period of one month. He is – initially – shocked by her proposition but eventually agrees because he’s concerned that if he doesn’t, Jodie might engage the services of someone who would take advantage of the situation and truly hurt her. A very arbitrary and vague set of guidelines (The Rules), consisting of five sketchy bullet points is drawn up, a detailed ‘in case it all goes horribly wrong’ protection contract signed, and off they go. You can see where this is heading, can’t you?

Needless to say, things don’t go to plan (there’d be no story if they did) and after little more than a day or so Jodie and Klaus find themselves in a bit of a situation. Klaus discovers his sadistic side. Jodie discovers she likes to be hurt. Klaus decides to throw away The Rules (such as they are) and make new ones. Without any discussion. Oh, boy.

My Take Me, Break Me experience went something like this …

@Michael (just after starting the book):

‘RED PEN ALERT!

I had to read the first chapter twice because all the tense switching confused me. (Maybe I am just A Bear of Very Little Brain?!) Present tense, then past written in the past tense, then past written in the present tense, then back to present in the present tense. Huh? What exactly are you signing, man [Klaus]?! End-of-year finance reports or a down-and-dirty sex slave agreement? Because, you know, that distinction is kind of important!

I now have the awful urge to sing Brittany Spears’ ‘Slave for You’, btw. :-/’

I get frightened by the lack of discussion and awful bullet-pointed rules:

I get confused about what genre I am actually reading:

[Brief interlude, during which Michael and I disagree over the outfit Klaus makes Jodie wear (he thinks it’s ridiculous, I think it’s fabulously degrading) and we both start Googling Magnetic Island, the setting for Take Me, Break Me, real estate prices.]

I get distracted by the idea of green bamboo canes:

Then Jodie and Klaus go to a play party and I want to get one of these out:

All in all, I felt like this the entire time I was reading:

As I said right at the very beginning, I liked Take Me, Break Me. But it scared me. Ergo the above picture. This is a case of the reader being ‘head f*cked’ as much as the characters because you’re enjoying all the things they’re doing together but feel horrible for it because the proposition is so dangerously and badly flawed …

This is a great story, albeit an uncomfortable one.

Safe, Sane and Consensual. Take Me, Break Me certainly proves how important this mantra is.

MICHAEL’S TAKE …

“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

– Don Corleone

Jodie is a comedienne. Not the worst, but not the greatest either. Her career is just going so-so. So she gets an idea. Make a documentary. But not about the life of a so-so comedienne. No, her idea is to make one about psychological enslavement. You see, Jodie has a secret love for that particular type of erotica we call the Capture Fantasy. So her idea is to film a woman throughout the process and through to the end result. And not just any woman. Herself (with some preset automatic cameras). But who can she get to be her captor?

Klaus. Good old Klaus. Her accountant. Oh, and her once-upon-a-time boyfriend. He’s the perfect guy for this sort of thing. Except maybe a little too cautious. When she approaches him with the idea, he reluctantly accepts. But only after drawing up a Contract and set of Rules so strict he pretty much takes all the fun out of it for both of them.

After all, this is supposed to be fun. Safe, Sane and Totally Consensual but fun as well. So what happens after 36 hours or so when Klaus dispenses with The Rules and makes it up as he goes along?

“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

– Lord Acton

When I read the description for this one, I actually bought it immediately. Because even though I didn’t plan on reading it as soon as soon as I did, I knew it was one I was definitely going to read. I thought this could be a fun and sexy story. Instead I found it to be a brutally realistic portrayal of two people playing around with things they didn’t understand and getting in absolutely and completely over their heads.

Especially Klaus. I am often pretty hard on male lead characters for doing the wrong thing. But in this case, I didn’t really blame him. Things were so off from the very beginning that you just had to hope they both got out without any permanent damage.

“When you stare into the abyss the abyss stares back at you.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche

Do I think you should read this book? If you like capture fantasy and BDSM fiction, I would say absolutely, positively, unequivocally ‘yes’.

But just keep in mind this is more what not to do.

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

Amazon.co.uk

• Take Me, Break Me – Kindle

Amazon.com

• Take Me, Break Me – Kindle

Smashwords

• Take Me, Break Me – ePub

The post Take Me, Break Me (Pierced Hearts) – Cari Silverwood appeared first on Behind the Chintz Curtain.