Maida (Medley of Books)'s Reviews > Ricochet

RATING: 4.5 Stars in the Sky Hearts!!! :D <3

“Monsters did exist. They didn't hide under the bed, though.
They stormed through the fucking door and stole away
everything we loved.”

Ricochet gives us a fast-paced revenge-romance that reverberates with a numbing current of chills throughout our bodies, its raw and gritty revenge plot – in equal measure paradoxically criminal and thrillingly condoning – keeping us riding a razor’s edge of anxiousness, and its unconventional yet sensual love story a paradigm to our utopian hearts. The final result is a tale that effortlessly combines elements that normally shouldn’t work together, its execution eliciting in us a montage of emotions, dark, painful and sexy, and entirely transfixing in their intensity.



Nick is everything we could want in a vengeful anti-hero, a man suffering from the brutal murder of his family, altered with a ruthless and calculating capacity and righting the wrongs on his own fully knowing the upshot of his dangerous scheme to be one of (his) captivity. Largely Nick is callous and his actions morally reprehensible because his retribution lies in killing those responsible for the massacre of his family and using Aubree as a weapon against her husband, Michael Culling, the trigger of the bloody carnage, making his loss our only emotional link to him and our feelings not truly festering until he gets hoisted in his own emotional petard. When it comes to the romance, Nick’s desire for Aubree is an epic internal battle between what he wants and what he thinks he shouldn’t have. Though his wavering is not in the least bit frustrating, instead combining the perfect amount of angst and heat to give us endless swoon while sparing us the trivial romantic drama.

“I don’t want easy and uncomplicated. I want love that makes me
fucking insane and irrational. I want to drown in it and
never come back up for air.”

Aubree, for her part, is as easy to sympathize with as Nick, her fragility a beacon to our hearts and her strength a catalyst to our admiration. She has every reason to fear once kidnapped by Nick, instead she reaches out to him, offering pieces of herself in attempt to understand him. She handles her predicament in a way that has us wanting to reach out and hug her for being strong, and simultaneously applauding her for not giving in to the cliché category of damsel in distress. She of course attempts escape a time or two recognizing that Nick is dangerous, but ultimately also recognizes that he is her savior as much her abductor. The two of them together are enthralling from first to last page, their relationship – physical and emotional – dovetailing beautifully with the darker themes.

“Perhaps Nick and I were opposites in life, as he said,
but in pain, we were the same. Two broken halves, with jagged edges
that seemed to fit together in some messed up way.”

Overall, Ricochet is a gripping, multi-POV standalone with perfectly timed twists and turns that keep us flipping through the pages and its violence and gore outstandingly blending with moments of heartache and passion to ensure we get a tale beautiful in its chaos and a jolt in the direction of Ms. Lake’s previous works while anticipating the new.



Posted: August 6, 2015