by Tess Sharpe
rating: ☆☆☆☆
published: 6th March 2018
spoilers? no
Goodreads
Galley provided by publisher
Barbed Wire Heart is the story of Harper McKenna, the daughter of the most powerful criminal in North County. Her father's biggest rival, Carl Springfield, is starting to make moves against them, specifically with an eye on Harper herself, and if she wants to avoid a bloody and violent turf war, she must stop him at any cost.
I don't know many authors better than Tess Sharpe at writing compelling mystery thrillers. There's something about the way she writes that just keeps you on the edge of your seat, completely hooked from start to finish. She did it with Far From You and she's done it again in Barbed Wire Heart. Not only that, she manages to make you feel hugely for the characters when they're in the midst of doing some brutal things. (I say characters, I mean the women. The men - minus Will - can pretty much all choke I don't care.)
And it is a very brutal book - within the first few chapters someone is tortured and then shot, but it's never graphic violence, or violence for the sake of violence. There are points to these scenes and a lot of it actually happens away from Harper's point of view. And it doesn't romanticise these gangs, like some books veer into on occasion. It sets it up so you're in full support of Harper's mission to dismantle the whole thing.
The best thing about this book is the women. How many thrillers do you read that have a woman as the main character, let alone a capable woman who'll do anything to protect the other women in her care? Normally, the only woman involved is the love interest/person to be saved from the bad guys, and they only end up tagging along and being generally useless, so to have Harper as the main character was hugely refreshing. I think I'm going to be spoiled for thrillers from now on.
(A full list of trigger warnings for the book can be found here.)
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