Hellbent

4.5 Thrilling Stars!
This third book picks up right after the end of Headlong, bk #2 of McKenna’s The Hellbound Brotherhood series. Anton Trask is working at his club when he gets a surprise visit from Fiona Garrett. She had grown up in the cult alongside Anton and his brothers. Anton and Fiona were attracted to each other but the madman leader wanted Fiona for his own sick, evil purposes. Anton and his brothers rescued her just before the cult’s destruction, putting her on a bus to safety. He never believed he would see her again. Now years later here she is, all grown up, sexier, and running for her life. She needs Anton’s help because he is the only one who would believe who was after her. Anton takes her back to Shaw’s Crossing so his brothers can help them find the truth and who is behind all the mysterious death’s surrounding Godsacre. The feelings that Anton and Fiona had for each other is back stronger and more explosive. Anton will do whatever it takes to keep her safe. But Fiona is stubborn and so bad@$$, having received the same survivalist training as the Trask brothers. She is determined to get her own revenge for what they all have suffered. I really loved both Fiona and Anton. They would butt heads over how to do things, but they both knew when to compromise, and that’s when the sparks would really fly! Mckenna never disappoints with her strong heroines, dominant alpha men who love their women fiercely, the hottest love/sex scenes, the most terrifying villains, and the best heart pounding action scenes, and this book has it all! This story is fast paced, and thrilling with plot twists that will have you on the edge of your seat. Hellbent is a scorching, suspenseful continuation to this series and I can’t wait to find out what happens next in bk #4, Heedless!

Hellbent is the third novel in Shannon McKenna’s Hellbound Brotherhood series, a series I’ve been avidly following since it’s inception, and to begin with, a warning for you–this is not a series you can jump right into midway through. This is a series you need to read in the order in which it was written or you’ll find yourself totally at sea. Of the three novels in the series so far, this is the one that I liked the least, primarily because I found it a bit too short, a bit too rushed, and I had a really hard time liking Fiona, the heroine, which is why I’m giving this novel 4.5 stars rather than 5.

If you’ve been following the series, you’ll remember Fiona as the girl that Anton insisted leave the Godsacre cult and compound before, at age 15-16, she was forced into marriage to a dirty-minded, filthy-mouthed, grabby-handed and vicious pedophile named Redd Kimball. Anton and his brothers, Eric and Mace, all managed to escape the compound just in time to not have been burned alive in the Great Hall with the rest of the cult members in a suspicious fire, with the doors padlocked from the inside, something they have always attributed to their crazy father, the cult leader, Jeremiah.

Hellbent is Anton’s story. He’s made quite a name and fortune for himself in the intervening years, and now owns a string of posh nightclubs called Hellbound, and is shocked when a fully grown Fiona, dressed to attract attention, enters one of his Seattle club and asks to see him. To put it mildly, she’s been his krytonite all these years, and she has built a computer business she conducts with 8 employees located all over the place, while she rarely sets foot outside except to attend martial arts class 3 times a week, to learn how to defend herself. She’s sought out Anton for his help, and she has quite a story to tell him–one he doesn’t fully believe at the outset, and it’s easy to understand why.

Redd Kimball was a brutal man, and it was his job to mete out punishment to those whom Jeremiah felt has violated his many rules, flogging and whipping were Kimball’s his specialty and he took pleasure in his torturing others. Years after her escape from his clutches, a routine x-ray exposed a foreign body beneath the deepest of Fiona’s scars–when it was removed, she was surprised that it was a microchip, and she had no idea who put it there, when, or why. A computer whiz herself, she couldn’t wait to see what was on it, but she knew it was somehow connected to Godsacre and the mysterious deaths that followed its destruction, and wasn’t at all surprised to find it password protected. She had six chances to guess the password but stopped after the first 5 attempts failed. The reason she now needs Anton’s help, is that her cousin, Patti, was brutally murdered inside her beach house one afternoon while Fiona was away for the day. Patti’s back bore deep and bloody knife wounds, wounds which were markedly similar to the scars on Fiona’s back. In looks, the two cousins bore quite a physical similarity and putting two and two together, Fiona knew that Kimball, who was supposedly killed in the fire, wasn’t dead at all, and that he was looking for that microchip, and didn’t care who he killed to get his hands on it. But Kimball was declared dead using dental records to identify his burned body, but is he really? Was it a mistake? And what is on that mysterious microchip that is worth killing for?

It’s quite a tale that Fiona tells, and, of course, Anton doesn’t believe her at first, but he’s always been attracted to her, and after all the weird goings on back home, most recently the death of the realtor who went up to Godsacre to list it for sale (Anton, Mace and Eric inherited the property after Jeremiah’s death), and also the death of Otis, the man who took in and raised Anton and his brothers after the destruction of the cult compound, who tried to get a message to them, but died before any of the brothers could get back to him. They are all heading back home to attend another funeral (the who and why of that was explained in the previous novel), and things are about to heat up, plot-wise, sex-wise, mystery/suspense wise, and violence-wise, so just hang onto your seats because that’s all the plot I’m giving away in this review, but I will tell you that you’re in for another high-intensity, dangerous, steamy, page-turner of a novel, and no one can pull that off quite the way Shannon McKenna can and does. Although I did have the aforementioned slight issues with this novel, it was still one heck of a gripping and exciting read and I recommend it.

I voluntarily read an advance reader copy of this novel. The opinions expressed are my own.