Ruin and Rule by Pepper Winters

 "We met in a nightmare. The in-between world where time had no power over reason. We fell in love. We fell hard. But then we woke up. And it was over . . ."

 

She is a woman divided. Her past, present, and future are as twisted as the lies she's lived for the past eight years. Desperate to get the truth, she must turn to the one man who may also be her greatest enemy . . .

 

He is the president of Pure Corruption MC. A heartless biker and retribution-deliverer. He accepts no rules, obeys no one, and lives only to reap revenge on those who wronged him. And now he has stolen her, body and soul.

 

Can a woman plagued by mystery fall in love with the man who refuses to face the truth? And can a man drenched in darkness forgo his quest for vengeance-and finally find redemption?

Title: Ruin and Rule | Series: Pure Corruption MC #1 | Author: Pepper Winter | Publisher: Forever | Release Date: 7/7/2015 | Genre: Contemporary Romance Light Erotica| Source: Publisher | Rating: 3.5

Ruin and Rule was a dark and gritty MC romance filled with angst and revenge.

 

The book was very different from the MC romances I’ve been reading. It starts out with the heroine (I won’t tell you who she is, you’ll have to discover it for yourself) waking up with no memory of who she is of why she’s been kidnapped. There’s something inside her telling her that she knows the green-eyed man who happens to be the president of the Pure Corruption MC, but he’s refusing to give her anything. As the story unwinds, bits and pieces of her memory come back although getting Kill to believe that she isn’t conning him is harder than she imagined.

 

The heroine could hold her own. She may have spent the entire book piecing her life together because of a double dose of amnesia but she wasn’t about to let Kill write her off. She was determined to remember so she could prove to him who she really was and get the answers she needed.

 

For some reason, Kill reminded me of Heathcliff from Wuthering Heights. He has a lot of qualities of a Byronic hero. A part of me thought he was almost too out there to like but honestly, the more I learned of his story, the more I liked him. I mean, there were things that made me question him in nearly every chapter, but when the book ended, I found I was rooting for him. There are many layers to Kill and to get the full understanding of him, you really do need to read the book.

 

The book is told mostly from the heroine’s POV and it worked brilliantly because it allowed the reader to go on the journey of remembering who she was with her. I really liked that approach, because gave the book more depth. While this was mostly told from her POV, at the start of each chapter Kill was able to tell what was going on his mind, so I felt very connected to both characters. Then towards the ending, there was a chapter from Kill’s POV as well, so we got to see his backstory and discover how the math genius became the president of a MC club bent on revenge.

 

There were a lot of things I liked in this book.

-The approach to how the story was told. The reader learns who the heroine is along with her.

-The fact that Kill was a genius who traded the stock market.

-The way I felt connected to both characters although it was mainly told from her POV.

-The suspense of trying to figure out who she is and which ones were the ‘good guys’

-Kill’s goal to turn Pure Corruption legit.

 

Here’s what I didn’t like about the book.

-Some of the things that she was able to recall about herself seemed too convenient. They wanted to have sex with no condom, that’s fine because, while she can’t even remember her own name, she magically remembers that she has an IUD

-Some of the flashbacks, which often were very sexual, felt a little skeevy because of the age of the heroine at the time.

-Kill went from a broody, mad-at-the-world man hell bent on making the heroine suffer to a soft lovely dovey type in the blink of an eye. While it was nice, it was way too abrupt.

-Sex is not always the answer. Every time they fought, it ended in sex without a resolution to the conflict. It seemed that Kill’s answer to a fight or to avoid answering a question was just to get to shagging and the heroine was completely fine with that.

-The way the secret is dragged out with so many, ‘I’m not going to tell you now. I’ll tell you later’s it could fill the Hoover dam.

 

What killed me the most with this story—I was happily reading along, enjoying the story, waiting for his big secret that had been spoken about through the majority of the book to finally be reveal—then it ended with a bloody To Be Continued. I mean, seriously, those are three words no reader wants to see. Especially when you promised said reader a juicy secret.

 

This book does come with a ‘Mature Audience’ tag on the back. It does venture into some light erotica and human trafficking. There is also a good bit of violence in the book.

 

Overall, I liked the book—read-200-pages-in-an-hour type of like—but the TBC ending left me snarling. I will continue the series because I NEED to know what happens next, but come on authors/publishers/writing-powers-that-be enough with the TBCs.

Have you read an MC read that you've loved?

Which ones have left you unsatisfied?