Stevie‘s review of Heart of the Devil (Cain Casey, Book 0) by Ali Vali
Contemporary Lesbian Romance published by Bold Strokes Books 16 Jan 18
I’ve been intrigued by the concept of this series about a lesbian crime boss, her partner, and her family for quite a while now, but I’ve always been deterred by how much catching up I’d have to do if I started at book one and tried to read my way through all the existing novels before the next one came out. The release of a prequel gave me just the way in I was looking for: something hopefully fresh and new without too much confusion over backstory. And while I don’t read a lot of series where the protagonists are out-and-out bad guys, I do have a lot of affection for antiheroes. So I suppose I was hoping to see the lesbian equivalent of Jake Arnott’s Harry Starks with a bit more romance thrown in for good measure.
Cain Casey is the oldest, and most business minded, of her crime boss father’s offspring, so she’s been running his empire in the year since his untimely death, all the while trying to track down his killers and bring them to justice (by her standards) before her impetuous younger brother finds them and does something rash to assuage his own grief. Most of the family’s income comes from bootlegging booze and from semi-legitimate pubs and clubs, and they have a healthy relationship with the owners of the totally above-board small businesses in the area. None of that, of course, keeps their operation from being targeted by both other criminal gangs and by local and national law enforcement officers, but Cain thinks she has a good grip on the situation. She is, however, aware that new operations – of both varieties – have recently moved into her patch and is keen to clamp down on them before any one causes her additional trouble.
Emma Verde, by contrast, is a hardworking and honest student, whose family of fundamentalists have all but disowned her after she left the family farm for a university education in the big city. Her new semester gets off to a bad start when she finds herself leveraged out of her campus job to make way for the spoiled son of a local senator. Needing a new source of income – one that she can fit in around her studies – and quickly, Emma enquires about working in a bar and soon finds herself hired by one of Cain’s businesses.
The two women quite literally bump into each other on Emma’s first night of her new employment, and while Emma fears for her job after spilling beer over the boss, Cain is instantly smitten. And so begins a slow-burning, year-long courtship.
While I was quite taken with the non-criminal women of Cain’s family, I found most of the other characters, including our two heroines, very difficult to like. Cain was lacking that spark of humour that I like to see in my bad guys, and most of her enemies were not only dour, but also not very bright – as well as downright misogynistic for the most part. I’d have preferred to see a proper battle of wits between two or three lots of mostly fun characters of different moral stance, and equally, I’d have liked Emma to show more of the courage she has early on in the story in her developing relationship with Cain. At least I now don’t have to worry about keeping up with the series proper.
Grade: C
Summary:
There was a time when Dalton Casey ran the Casey family while grooming the next generation, but Cain Casey inherits the reins too early when Dalton is gunned down. His loss leaves Cain devastated, and she does her best to keep the business together, but his loss has left her adrift and hungry for revenge. That ends the night a new employee douses her in beer.
Emma Verde has left everything behind in Wisconsin to attend Tulane in New Orleans. She sees an opportunity to make enough money for the coming semester when she lands a job at an Irish pub in the French Quarter. That job soon spirals into something else.
That’s the story we know, but this is the tale of how Cain and Emma fell in love, and their history proves that love was the only thing that saved the heart of the devil.
Read an excerpt.
Other books in this series:
