Devious Deals
Deliciously Dark and Deviously Delectable
Holy hell, the book hangover is epic! Once again, Sarah Bale has taken a frilly fairytale and molded it into a deliciously dark, and deviously delectable, bedtime-busting deep-dive into a world I cannot get enough of. Devious Deals is salacious and steamy, evoking a chaos of emotions, and I didn’t know how badly I needed this HEA until I got it!
Kieran and Ari are so beautifully deep and vulnerable and conflicted and intense. So perfectly opposite yet so intentionally fated. And there are so many twists and turns in this novel, both within their relationship and surrounding it. The level of unexpected connectivity in the interwoven fairytales in this novel brings an added layer of texture and depth to the unexpected storyline, spinning it out of control before wrapping it into an intricate web of closure and revenge and deceit and longing and love.
Bale has an incredible way of building characters with depth and authenticity, bringing out qualities through their interactions that evoke solid, intense, often guttural reactions from her other characters as well as her readers. These are not the characters you remember from growing up. They are sooo much more.
If you like dark romance, this novel will sink into your soul. But, please pay very close attention to the author’s note and content warning. The escape this story provides is intense, with no cliffhanger, and a guaranteed HEA (but damn, do they go through it all for it). It can be read as a standalone, but will be much better appreciated and enjoyed if the reader understands the context surrounding it and the world it’s built into, so reading Bale’s Bedtime Stories and books 1 and 2 of Bale’s Villainous Tales is highly recommended.
