Relentless Flame by Jillian David – Review, Guest Post & Giveaway
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Description:
Immortal. Colossal. Suave. Indebted killer Dante Blackstone has the world at his feet. Every vice, any desire, is his for the asking—until he finds the one person he cannot have: one sweet, diminutive woman who could bring about Dante’s destruction.
Despite her supernatural ability to heal others, a devastating act of evil has left Hannah Miller broken in body and spirit. As she rebuilds her life while on the lam, a not-so-chance meeting with Dante chips away at the walls surrounding her fragile heart. But before their fledgling love can take flight, Dante’s boss sends an evil minion with one mandate: Eliminate Dante’s new reason to break his eternal contract.
As they fight to survive, Hannah’s amazing gift gives Dante one chance to save them both from the vicious minion. How can any love survive eternal hell and annihilation?
The answer lies in Dante’s inferno.
Review.
Wow !!! Relentless Flame by Jillian David was a great second book in her Hell to Pay series.
You don’t need to read the first book, but a few of the previous characters are in this book. So it helps to have a little background. I was extremely lucky to read the first book, and liked Dante straight away, cold killer, but loyal to a fault, oh and a total hound dog !!!!
He’s in a little town searching for someone, as he has a message to deliver. Dante is an indebted …. An immortal assassin, chained by the devil, he kills evil with his dagger, hoping one day to repay the debt and be free.
Dante is not use to being told NO, men and women flirt and offer phone numbers and favours, so when a mousy librarian says no, Dante makes it his mission to have her.
Hannah is hiding, after escaping from an abusive father. Hannah and her brother have escaped, and now they live their lives on the edge. She has a talent; she takes people aches, pains and injuries into herself. But, after something at home goes wrong, Hannah flees for her life.
The attraction between Dante and Hannah is very heartfelt. I love how Hannah puts Dante’s ego in it place, and how Dante is never sure about how Hannah feels about him. I loved how Hannah’s character grew under Dante’s care and attention.
Dante’s boss sends out other assassins to end Hannah (he is worried after losing Peter to a woman, he wants to keep his indebted), so they end up on the run together. Dante can think of nothing else but keeping her safe and protected. He realizes how much she had come to mean to him.
They end up in the woods in a small cabin hidden away where Dante finally risks everything and tells Hannah the truth about what he really is. Will he also tell her the real reason he is there ? What will Hannah think of Dante? Will she believe him ?
I loved getting a glimpse of Peter and Allie from the first book and seeing how they are doing. I also love Barnaby, and hope he appears in the next book. I have to admit I didn’t connect with Dante and Hannah as much as Peter and Allie, but I did enjoy their story more !!
Relentless Flame and the Hell to Pay series is fantastic, and I highly recommend it. I can’t wait to see where Jillian David takes us next.
Reviewed by Julie B.
Copy provided by Author
Writing Romance and Fiction
A naked person on an exam table is a heck of a lot different than a naked person in a romance novel.
Here’s my life. It’s like, if you went to a nudist beach, thinking you’re going to see all these good looking, hot bodies in provocative poses, all sprawled on the sand. But all you see are…rolls of pudge and loose skin, body hair and strange, blotchy rashes. Or even some body fungus. Yuck, reality.
For me, writing romance after a day in the trenches (e.g. office visits, doing skin lesion removals and PAP smears, and examining places that shall remain nameless) is a little like that beach. Sigh. It’s not pretty.
But then I realized something important: As the author, I have the power of the pen to make every single person on my fictional beach oiled, toned, and sporting an ideal body-mass index.
Like most authors, the inspiration for writing comes from everything and everyone around me. Holy smokes, the stories patients tell me cannot be true. But they are. I’ve done the unpleasant (funky, smelly) exams and have the proof.
But writing romance? It’s fiction, right? So it needs to be crazier and bigger than life.
That’s where paranormal comes in. All of those unlikely scenarios and ideas from real life become HUGE plotlines when you introduce something supernatural to the mix.
Take Hannah and Dante, the main characters in my second novel, Relentless Flame. How many times did I wish, as a physician, that I could put my hands on a patient and take away their pain? Lots. Now enter my heroine Hannah, who can do exactly that. (The act of removing others’ pain hurts her badly, but she does it because it’s the right thing to do.)
Now let’s go back to our nude beach and find a likely candidate as Hannah’s love interest. Not the hirsute beached whale sipping Coors and eating beef jerky like cows might never reproduce again. But the guy doing pushups. With one arm. Naked. Without a care in the world. Yup. He’ll do.
See, that’s where fiction can take you. Now we’ve got a tormented heroine (who is cute and sweet, of course), plus a swaggering mountain of a man (who, once you get to know him, you’ll see has a sensitive and tormented side as well). And there we have it: STORY TIME.
What about the action and bad things happening to all of the characters in my books? Again, I draw on real life. In my work in rural hospitals, I’ve seen about a thousand ways humans can be damaged, maimed, and killed. After patching folks up, shipping them off to trauma centers, or crying with families, I realized that those stories and those injuries made for some realistic scenarios.
So what do we have now?
#1) Heroine with a skill I wish I had
#2) Hotter than hell hero, so obviously someone I will never see/treat
#3) Scenario of injury/pain/suffering that is seemingly insurmountable
Stir in one overworked physician/writer and BOOM, there’s a story!
And that, my friends, is how the Hell to Pay series came about, start to finish.
My weird experiences + “what if” questions + a vivid imagination = Hell to Pay series.
I love creating something beautiful out of pain. I love giving voice to the experiences of my patients. And I love being able to go to that nudie beach and turn everyone there into over-the-top hotties — not wrinkled and sunburnt vacationers.
So in a word, completely escape reality.
But isn’t that what fiction is about?
Jillian David lives near the end of the Earth with her nut of a husband and two bossy cats. To escape the sometimes-stressful world of the rural physician, she writes while on call and in her free time. She enjoys taking realistic settings and adding a twist of “what if.” Running or hiking on local trails often promotes plot development.
You can learn more about Jillian David at the following links:
Website / Twitter / Email
Jillian is offering ecopies of IMMORTAL FLAME (First book in series) to THREE (3) lucky commenters at The Reading Cafe
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7. Giveaway is open Internationally.
8. Giveaway runs from May 3 to May 8 2015
