Absolution by Sloane Kennedy
On December 7, 2019 by Jaye
Absolution by Sloane Kennedy
🍸🍸🍸🍸1/2
Blurb
After four years abroad, artist Jonas Davenport has come home
to start building his dream of owning his own art studio and gallery. But just
as he’s ready to put the darkness of his past behind him forever, it comes
roaring back with a vengeance.
The only thing keeping ex-cop Mace Calhoun from
eating his own gun after an unthinkable loss is his role in an underground
syndicate that seeks to get justice for the innocent by taking the lives of the
guilty. Ending the life of the young artist who committed unspeakable crimes
against the most vulnerable of victims should have been the easiest thing in the
world. So why can’t he bring himself to pull the trigger?
After years of fighting in an endless,
soul-sucking war, Navy SEAL Cole Bridgerton has come home to fight another
battle – dealing with the discovery that the younger sister who ran away from home
eight years earlier is lost to him forever. He needs answers and the only
person who can give them to him is a young man struggling to put his life back
together. But he never expected to feel something more for the haunted artist.
Cole and Mace. One lives by the rules, the other
makes his own. One seeks justice through the law while the other seeks it with
his gun. Two men, one light, one dark, will find themselves and each other when
they’re forced to stand side by side to protect Jonas from an unseen evil that
will stop at nothing to silence the young artist forever.
But each man’s scars run deep and even the
strength of three may not be enough to save them…
Note: This book contains M/M/M sexual content
and is intended for mature audiences.
Trigger Warning: This book contains references
to childhood sexual abuse.
This is Book 1 in the series, but can be
read as a stand-alone story – no cliffhangers.
Buy Link
Review
I found this book by trawling through a m/m rec group. The original post was seeking books about extremely lonely men. I thought, this is right up my alley. Pretty much all of my heroes deal with loneliness. Brendan in Midnight, Cameron in Rites of Spring, Jared in Building Up to Love – these are some examples. Luis in Hunter is an extreme example. So I scrolled through the thread to see what I could see.
Mace in Absolution was recommended pretty highly in this thread, and so I paid close attention to him. He’s definitely a lonely guy. He’s haunted by some serious ghosts, the kind I don’t know if I could withstand. Some are of his own making. Some are not. Mace is also a vigilante out there looking for a justice that eluded him, and I can’t say as I blame him.
Cole and Jonas didn’t grab me quite as strongly, but each of them had a kind of quiet strength I admired. Cole kind of held things together the best, while Jonas radiated a kind of purity and sweetness that almost broke the heart.
From a plot perspective, it took a while to get the three of these guys onto the same page. Once they were there, it definitely felt like they didn’t get out of bed for the last third part of the book. Given each of their backgrounds, I completely understand why it would take so long to make things happen. That part felt perfectly realistic and reasonable.
The libidos on these guys? A little less so. But we don’t read steamy romance novels for realistic libidos or refractory periods. I will admit that I started to glaze over with the sex scenes after a while, but some readers do that and some do not. It was also my second high-heat novel that day, so it might have been time for me to tap out. TL;DR – your mileage may vary when it comes to tolerance for the level of heat in this book.
The idea of a vigilante group going around and taking out pedophiles has its appeal, but the overall plot of the book explains why vigilantism is not a viable law enforcement alternative. The twists were believable, and given that this was a field with which I have a certain amount of familiarity I can say that with a certain amount of authority. The only thing that felt a little forced was the way things turned out for Mace, but I’ll let you find that part out for yourself.
All in all, this was an excellent story. I recommend it to just about anyone, but it does come with a hard trigger warning. If you can safely read it, you really should. With sexual tension you could play like a violin, scorching sex scenes, a suspenseful plot to die for, and characters you can live for, Absolution has it all.
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