Rating: 3.25🌈
Broken is the first book in a new connected series, Erebus Assassins, by Reese Knightly. If you’re familiar with other series and characters as well as the types of themes and storylines that come with them, you know exactly what to expect from Broken.
There will be damaged characters with intense relationship dynamics, shady or situational morality, and often painful, violent backgrounds.
And flowing through each other’s stories are the characters and couples from all the other series. Sometimes this works. Other times, as I feel it happens here, it doesn’t.
Broken opens as Ice unknowingly stumbles upon an assignment already in progress. An assassination is going down and the agent is Echo from another team. That Agency is one Ice used to work for . This violent brief interaction sets off a chain of chaotic events that include Ice stalking Echo, to the extent he’s quitting his job at work and rejoining another agency.
This is one example of the issues I see with the story. Knightley spends little time on developing any relationship between Ice and Echo to warrant this depth of obsessive interest or behavior. Ice just decides Echo is it for him and hunts him, whether Echo wants him to or not. In Echo’s case, it’s decidedly not.
Another is with all the various characters themselves. Some are carryovers and some are new. But the reader must be able to recognize them and remember who they are, how they fit into the different couples dynamics/agency structure and even current tortuous situations. Otherwise, it’s a constant struggle to understand who all these people are and how they fit together.
It’s all very unsupported and unsustainable for the book to have this many characters and their own narratives dropped in (and out) behind it.
Echo has a horrific history but it’s buried under everything else so the reader, at least I did, finds it hard to connect with. Which brings us back to the villain of the story.
That entire element, including his identity, just never felt plausible. From the size of the operation , and the fact that he had been able to run it as long as he had, given the facts, doesn’t seem believable framed out by all the other characters in the book. It seems more a dramatic needs element than a naturally occurring part of the story.
But so much of Broken feels unexplored or incomplete, a jumble of characters and plot lines. A new series should focus on new starts.
Why did this feel like Knightley took odds and ends from all her previous series and just dump them here?
Read this because you’re a fan of the author or like the other series. All those series listed below.
Erebus Assassins:
✓ Broken #1
â—¦ Agony #2 – July 31,2024
Related series with crossover characters and agencies :
Cobalt Security – 6 books
Code of Honor – 8 books
Out for Justice -7 books
Buy link
Broken (Erebus Assassins Book 1)
Blurb
He craved him like he’d never craved anyone before.
-Ice
They’d kissed. And spent a brief and wild time together.
He fell.
But Echo disappeared on him.
And now the chase was on.
He was going to find Echo, catch him, and make him his.
Even if it killed him.
-Echo
He should have never screwed the blue-eyed blond…
But he had.
He couldn’t say why, but Ice got on his last nerve.
So he wounded the guy a couple of times.
Since then, Ice seemed to be in his way every time he turned around.
Assassin vs assassin
Blind to love
Unrequited love
Emotional Scars
A traitor
**Please note 18+ content. See inside for trigger warnings.
• Publication date: April 4, 2024
• Language: English
• Print length: 244 pages
Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words 