Tempted by Deception (Deception Trilogy 2), by Rina Kent | Free Audiobook
Tempted by Deception (Deception Trilogy 2)Audiobook
No more pretending, and no way to stop
The second book picks the story up exactly where the first left it, and the relationship has stopped pretending to be an arrangement. Adrian and the woman living under his dead wife's name have gone past the point where either of them can claim to be acting a part, and neither of them is remotely good for the other.
What follows is less a courtship than a war of attrition between two people with the same talent for cruelty and the same inability to walk away. She is trying to work out who she used to be, and more importantly whether any of her old life was real. He is trying to hold a household together with violence and money, and discovering that neither of those things answers the questions he is actually asking. The book is narrated by Jason Clarke and Desiree Ketchum, who alternate the two voices, and it runs 9 hrs and 17 mins.
This is the middle volume of three, and it behaves like one: it does not resolve, it escalates. Read the first book before this one, and know that the trilogy is one story rather than three, which means the ending you are waiting for arrives in the third and final instalment.
The useful thing to know about the middle book of this trilogy is that it is the one the readers defend. Almost every reader who disliked the first volume says the same sentence in some form: it gets better from book two. That is worth taking seriously, because it is rare for a fandom to be that consistent about where a series finds its feet.
What changes is the balance of power. The first book keeps the heroine in the dark about her own history, and one of the fairest criticisms of it is that events seem to happen around her rather than to her. Here, the arrangement is out in the open and both characters are choosing it, badly and repeatedly. Adrian's jealousy and need to control stopped being a performance in the previous book, and the consequences are now the plot rather than the subtext.
The reception is far from unanimous, and the honest version of it is this: readers describe this instalment as the most frustrating of the three while also calling it the one that made them finish. That sounds contradictory until you read the discussions, which are full of people arguing about a decision the heroine makes and whether any of it counts as love. A Reddit thread on this very book calls it one of the most frustrating in the genre, and the replies are about evenly divided between agreeing and rereading it anyway.
The things the trilogy is praised for are all present here. Jason Clarke and Desiree Ketchum split the narration, which matters more in this volume than in the first, because the book alternates between two people who are deliberately lying to each other. The audio also keeps the series' most complicated scenes easy to follow, which is not nothing in a story built on who knows what.
Same warning as before, and it is not a formality: Worth knowing before you start, because reviewers of this trilogy always list it: there is a dub con dynamic throughout, a rape scene that turns out to be a nightmare rather than something that happened, and references to child loss, alcoholism and mental illness, on top of the usual violence of the genre.
Read Vow of Deception first. If you already know you like the darker end of mafia romance, the site's top dark romance list is a good place to line up what to hear next.
Tempted by Deception is the second volume of Rina Kent's Deception Trilogy, and it is the part readers point to when they defend the series. The pretence is over: the woman living under a dead woman's name and the man who put her there are no longer pretending the arrangement is only business.
This is a dark mafia romance with two alternating narrators, Jason Clarke and Desiree Ketchum, and the middle book of a trilogy that tells one continuous story.
It runs 9 hrs and 17 mins. Listen to the first book before this one, and expect the trilogy's content warnings to apply throughout: dub con dynamics, references to child loss and mental illness, and several genuinely dark scenes. With the free trial, you can pick any title you want, this one included, cancel whenever you like, and the audiobook stays in your library.
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