Rating: 4.5🌈
Head Games ends the Wages of Sins trilogy by Onley James and Neve Wilder about a group of professional assassins who end up finding a relationship and a partner to love and kill with.
I’ve enjoyed each book and found they’ve gotten better and more interesting with each couple. From the age gap first story of the first book, to the dueling assassins of Playing Dirty, each couple’s dynamic has gotten more complex and frankly more fascinating.
Madigan and Azrael’s story, Playing Dirty, both assassins were dueling over the same targets on The Red Queen’s kill list. In order to gain access to a specific target, they met Dr. E. Tobias Eastman, and his strangely destructive teacup Yorkie, Mantis. Eastman’s specialty and clientele is psychopaths. The worst of the worst. Including the person on their list.
How it all turns out I’ll leave to that story. Let’s just say the doc and his pet made quite the impression.
So I was very excited to see that he was the other half of the narrative here.
Soren Warner has been a part of this series and odd group of assassins from the beginning. Supposedly “retired’ but he’s always lingering around the edges of each big element and he’s there whenever someone from the group requires assistance.
He’s a world traveler, secure in himself and the fact that he’s a hired assassin . He kills only those that he or his group consider vile criminals unlikely to be caught due to their high positions in society or their connections are unlikely to be given the appropriate sentences , like those on the current Red Queen’s kill list.
Dr. E. Tobias Eastman, with Mantis, his teacup Yorkie as his only companion, has made the worst of the world’s psychopathic killers his clients and his study for fifteen years. He’s famous or infamous for being the Criminal psychologist with a list of clients who killed…often.
Anomalies fascinated him. Tobias had one major question.
What made a killer ?
He thought he’d figured out part of the equation. A management of compulsions .
Then he met Mads and Azrael, a couple who happily kill together with no remorse. Fifteen years of study and thought overturned by watching and listening to their relationship and dynamic.
Onley James and Neve Wilder sets up one of the most fascinating dynamics and romance when they put these two characters together. Each so incredibly different yet each provides an astonishing window into the psychology of the other.
It all starts when two sets of kill lists intersect.
Head Games is part psychological , part action, part romance, and all weirdly entertaining. It is about assassins and people who want to kill after all.
It is dark fiction. There’s plenty of death on the page. So be warned. If this makes you uncomfortable, this series and story probably isn’t for you.
For those of you who enjoy action and dark fiction, I’m highly recommending this book and the trilogy. I actually wish the authors had continued it. It felt as though there were more stories left to tell and three books left The Red Queen’s list and the group unfinished.
Read them in the order they were written for the events and relationships to make sense.
Wages of Sin:
🔹Bad Habits #1
🔹Play Dirty #2
🔹Head Games #3
https://www.goodreads.com › showHead Games (Wages of Sin, #3) by Onley James – Goodreads
Synopsis:
“You’re a vigilante in an argyle sweater.”
Straight-laced psychologist Tobias is an expert in the deviant behavior of others but a novice when it comes to his latest endeavor: serial killer.
After years of high-profile kills and mentoring numerous other assassins, laid-back Soren lives his life in a state of semi-permanent vacation. He comes out of an early retirement to help out a friend, only to set off sparks with the renowned psychologist when they discover they’re hunting the same man.
One shaky truce later, Soren has a new mentee in Tobias.
Soren finds Tobias and his dark impulses fascinating. Tobias finds Soren’s relaxed attitude infuriating. They have nothing in common except their ability to kill and chemistry neither can deny. But a kill list, a rage room, the Irish mob and the ghosts of their past all stand in the way of their happily ever after.
Head Games is a steamy, thrill ride of a romance with a HEA and no cliffhangers. It features an uptight, sweater-loving psychologist with a taste for blood and a soft spot for his murderous yorkie, the most zen contract killer to ever mosey the earth, plenty of dark humor, and true love. Because even bad dudes deserve their soulmates. This is book 3 in the Wages of Sin series. Each book follows a different couple.
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 