Under the Skin

Mic Vargas once loved tagging bridges and living on the street. Now, he builds bridges instead of tagging them but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t crave the freedom of living on the street. While visiting his construction site at night, a street kid falls at his feet and he sees a chance to give back. Little does he know that saving this kid is going to take more than money and it could cost him his own life.

Lena’s never had an easy life, being an illegal immigrant is hard enough but when her father is taken by ICE, she’s forced to steal more to help her mother and siblings survive. When she first meets Mic, she thinks him an easy target. When he tries to help her, at first she rebels. She’s learned the hard way that trust only leads to heartbreak. When Jax, a crime boss, holds Lena’s family hostage, she knows the only one who can help her family escape is Mic. She just hopes she can make it out alive. Can she and Mic save her family or will she be flayed alive?

Under the Skin the fourth and final book in the Skin Quartet series. I have to admit, this is my favorite book in the series. It’s so much more than a romantic thriller with life and death stakes. . . it’s a stark expose on human nature and how no matter how much money one has, it doesn’t take away the scars underneath. Mic is a clear example of this theory and it plays out well in this story.

What makes this a must-read? The characters are addictive to read and you’ll be whipping through the pages as the plot amps up with suspenseful scenes. The combative dialogue between Mic and Lena is fun, flirty and full of snark. Both know what it takes to trust someone and both are attracted to each other. The plot is filled with intensity and I couldn’t stop reading until I was finished with the book. The ending was sublime.

If you’re looking for a romantic thriller to dive into with unconventional characters and a very bad antagonist, look no further than Under the Skin. This is a standalone but you’ll want to read the other books in the series after you read Under the Skin. Highly recommend!

My Rating: 5 stars

I liked the three previous books of Zara West’s Skin Quartet a lot. The fourth, Under the Skin, is the best of all, in my opinion. I won’t outline the plot: you probably wouldn’t be reading reviews if you hadn’t already read the blurb, or else you’ve probably read someone else’s review and have an idea of what the book is about. I will say that it’s set about ten years after the third book, Within the Skin, and takes up the story of Hanger, Alba/El Toro’s little brother. No longer a difficult teenager, Hanger, now known as Mic, is now a successful architect. He should have the world at his feet but success comes with a price. He loves building bridges but not the managerial hassles and business suit. He loves his sister but not her over-protectiveness. He can no longer climb scarily tall buildings and bridges to tag them with their old deco boys’ sign.

Then Lena, walking on a bridge span to evade the police, falls virtually at his feet. Mic’s world is about to change.

The outstanding thing about Ms. West’s novels is that they take the standard romantic suspense tropes and give them a shake, making them fresh and new.

Zara West supplied an advance copy of Under the Skin for me to review but I bought one anyway.

An engaging read of hope, Lena is doing what she thinks is the only thing she can to keep her family safe and fed by stealing. She keeps getting deeper and deeper in trouble and gets to the point of no return. She has a hard time trusting anyone so she pushes Mic away when he tries to help. An emotional up and down rollercoaster ride. As much as I do not like someone who resorts to stealing, you can really feel the turmoil within Lena with the choices she had to make to payoff the debt they got trapped with along with just trying to stay safe. Mic is a character who feels like no one will give him the chance to be independent, his sister and friends are always looking over his shoulder to “help” him and he just wants to be able to make his own decisions. He finds Lena and he decides to reach out and help her no matter what everyone tells him. There is some corruption by someone else with the bridge he is working on building, I would have liked a little more details on what was really going on behind the scenes. A good and enjoyable read. I received this book for free and voluntarily reviewed.

Of all the books contained within this series, this final novel proves to have the most poignant, thought-provoking, and perhaps relatable observation of them all. Up until this point, we have seen a focus on characters who were wealthy billionaires, tattoo artists, and some who lived on the streets. In this final novel we see a focus on Mic, a man who just ten years before was a kid living on the streets, putting up graffiti tags all over the city with his protective sister. He’s now a successful architect, richest beyond his wildest imagination. He lives in an expensive townhouse with fancy clothes, a soft bed, warmth, and plenty of food. And yet, who is he really when you peel away all the outer layers of perceived wealth? Who is he under the skin?

We’ve all heard the phrase “money can’t buy happiness”, and in this novel we see an examination of how true that statement can be. For even though Mic now seemingly has everything he ever dreamed of and more, underneath it all he misses his former life living on the streets. It may not have been glamorous or safe. He may have gone to bed cold and hungry, but he lived his life the way he wanted, unbound by rules and people dictating where he could and couldn’t go. This observation that Mic carries out throughout the novel in regards to how his life has turned out grounds us as the reader. It encourages self-reflection, and for each of us to consider who we might be when we remove the facade of what others might expect of us.

This deep introspection of who a person truly is on the inside carries over into Mic’s interactions and eventual relationship with Lena. Upon first meeting, Mic has a basic surface-level impression of this young woman. She’s a thief. A child of the streets, just like he used to be. But by having come from that world, Mic understands that there is often more beneath the surface that can drive a person to sometimes do terrible things. Mic becomes transfixed to discover how this beautiful young woman resulted to thievery in order to solve her problems in life.

As we learn who Lena is under her own skin, we discover that Mic’s initial inkling that there was more to her than meets the eye was entirely accurate. Lena steals, not for herself, but for her family. As undocumented immigrants in a big city, her mother and little brothers have few options, and she’s taken it upon herself to ensure they make it through each day in one piece. Her fall into thievery was not done because of greed, but rather survival and caring for her family. Lena was initially on the path to becoming a nurse, but when her father was deported, and the scumbag lawyer who defended him demands an exorbitant fee, Lena has no choice but to result to a life of crime. We soon see that her life is much like Alice’s, in that once she makes that first fall through the rabbit hole, things start spiraling out of control very quickly.

Another successful point of this story is that it manages to keep you on your toes from start to finish. Every time you think there might be a lull in the suspense, another dramatic element will be introduced just at the right time to ensure you’re still paying attention. On the one hand, we see some shady and questionable issues surrounding Mic’s latest bridge project. On the other, things start to spiral out of control as Lena’s success as a thief draws the attention of one very seedy character who becomes intent on drawing her into his world of crime. And he’ll do whatever it takes to bring her over to his side, even if he has to threaten the safety of her mother and brothers to do so.

Mic is intent on helping Lena and her family escape whatever trouble it is they’ve found themselves in, to the point where he’s willing to brush aside the turmoil of his own life in order to focus all his attention on saving this woman who has quickly come to mean so much to him. Lena constantly struggles with the question of whether or not she should put her trust in Mic, or if she should instead do whatever she can to push him out of her life to spare him any hurt. These inner debates were successful in building up the intensity and unpredictability of a scene, yet also incredibly frustrating at times. We see her logic in the fact that she barely knows this man, and that by asking him for help she might be placing him in extreme danger that he might not be able to get them out of. At the same time though, you just want to scream at her to take the helping hand that’s being offered, to hold on with all her might and never let go.

5 stars
I received a free copy of the novel Under the Skin: The Skin Quartet, Book 4 by Zara West and this review was given freely.
Now an adult and a billionaire architect and philanthropist, Hangar aka Mic’s is frustrated by the limited freedom caused by his amputation and locals attempting to stop his bridge building. On a nighttime excursion, Mic has a chance encounter with the illegal alien and thief Lena which places him back in the clutches of Jax and Bear, the men instrumental in his amputation. This full length novel is action packed, provides good updates on the other characters of the series, contains a complex plot, some graphic violence, some steamy scenes, a few twist and ultimately a happy ending.