Book Review and GIVEAWAY: You Can Go Home Now, by Michael Elias {ends 11/4}

Guest review by: Becki Bayley

The women in this sorority don’t go to classes, football games, have sex, drink alcohol, and smoke weed at parties with boys becoming men. Here in the shelter are women who, in different ways, have experienced men as people who abuse, batter, and sometimes try to kill them. In this sorority, I sleep in the basement. I wake up, climb the stairs, and emerge into another life: I have coffee with the women who have just seen their children off to school, or are assembling the ones who are being homeschooled because their lives are at risk from homicidal fathers or vulnerable to kidnapping by less-than-homicidal fathers. I learn that daddy and husband are often not terms of endearment. In this ordered and tremulous environment, we go over kitchen and housekeeping duties. There are schedules and timetables posted for whose turn it is to buy food, cook, or clean.

Nina Karim has made revenge the focus of her life. Can she ever achieve it? And if she does, what’s next?

Official synopsis:

“My name is Nina Karim. I am a single thirty-one-year-old woman who likes cats, Ryan Reynolds movies, beautiful sunsets, walking on a wintry beach holding hands with a tall, caring, lightly bearded third-wave feminist. Yeah, right.”

Nina is a tough Queens detective with a series of cold case homicides on her desk – men whose widows had the same alibi: they were living in Artemis, a battered women’s shelter, when their husbands were killed.

Nina goes undercover into Artemis. Though she is playing the victim, she’s anything but. Nina knows about violence and the bullies who rely on it because she’s experienced it in her own life.

In this heart-pounding thriller Nina confronts the violence of her own past in Artemis where she finds solidarity with a community of women who deal with abusive and lethal men in their own way.

For the women living in Artemis there is no absolute moral compass, there is the law and there is survival. And, for Nina, who became a cop so she could find the man who murdered her father, there is only revenge.

This book started out a little slow (besides the murder scene before chapter 1). The main character’s narration style was a little choppy with some hard-to-follow segues. But about halfway through, the readers knew everything we needed to know and the book took off!

While the relationship between Nina and her boyfriend, Bobby was amusing, several of the police department characters didn’t seem necessary. When an officer appeared later in the book after an introduction in the first half, it was hard to remember how they were involved. It didn’t change the excitement as the book progressed. Once the action started coming together, there was no turning away. The two seemingly independent story lines (Nina’s quest for avenging her father’s death, and the murders potentially linked to a domestic violence shelter) crashed together in a totally unexpected way.

Overall, I’d give this book 3.5 out of 5 stars. One thing that is always refreshing and makes a book feel completely rewarding is when justice prevails. This book brings the justice, in more ways than one. I’d recommend this for fans of police procedurals and vigilante justice.

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Becki Bayley is a Gemini who loves her husband, her kids, and her cats. She is registered to vote and will be completing her ballot any day now. Check out other book reviews by her at SweetlyBSquared.com.

GIVEAWAY:

One of my lucky readers will win a copy of You Can Go Home Now!

Enter via the widget below. Giveaway will end on Wednesday, November 4th, at 11:59pm EST, and winner will be contacted the next day via email, and have 24 hours to respond, or an alternate winner will be chosen.

U.S. residents only, please.

Good luck!

You Can Go Home Now, by Michael Elias