On the run from a killer, can these two guys find time to fall in love and deal with old wounds?

Damien Mitchell was in a horrible car accident and is now suffering from amnesia. He’s still pretty sure that there’s something wrong with the people who are supposedly his parents visiting him in the psychiatric ward. After escaping, he goes in search of his best friend and band mate Miki. While trying to find Miki, Damien meets the owner of a bar, Sionn Murphy, who over time becomes a good friend and lover. Now they just have to survive the multiple death threats to see if they can have a real relationship.

The romance between Damien and Sionn was done nicely with a lot of time spent developing their characters and relationship through action and conversations. Sionn was a nice guy surrounded by a large and wonderful family, and he just wanted to take care of Damien. Unfortunately, Damien was such a beaten down character that it was a struggle to enjoy his story. He was severely abused as a child, almost died in a car accident and suffered from severe amnesia, lost 2 of his best friends in the same car accident, and is now being hunted by a psychotic killer. Any of those could be devastating, but having all of them come into play got to be a bit much.

I had issues with the flow of the story. For instance, during their first sex scene, there was a break in the middle of it to take us to a gory crime scene. During the sex scene, we were reminded once again about how Damien was tortured as a child. Needless to say, this really eliminated my enjoyment of the first time they made love.

This story spent about half the time on the romance and the rest in the mind of a psychotic serial killer. The details surrounding the killings are very graphic and gory. The romance started out strong with the focus on Damien and Sionn, but then the focus moved to the murders. It wasn’t really a mystery as to why it was happening, since that was explained fairly early on. The biggest question was about who would get killed next, since everybody was up for grabs.

I liked seeing Damien reconnect with his best friend Miki from the first story and get a feel for how that friendship worked since so much was mentioned about it in the first book.

If you enjoy your romance mixed with evil, psychotic killers, then I think you’ll really enjoy this thriller.

Originally reviewed for The Romance Reviews. Complimentary copy provided by author/publisher for an honest review.

BLURB

He was dead. And it was murder most foul. If erasing a man’s existence could even be called murder.

When Damien Mitchell wakes, he finds himself without a life or a name. The Montana asylum’s doctors tell him he’s delusional and his memories are all lies: he’s really Stephen Thompson, and he’d gone over the edge, obsessing about a rock star who died in a fiery crash. His chance to escape back to his own life comes when his prison burns, but a gunman is waiting for him, determined that neither Stephen Thompson nor Damien Mitchell will escape.

With the assassin on his tail, Damien flees to the City by the Bay, but keeping a low profile is the only way he’ll survive as he searches San Francisco for his best friend, Miki St. John. Falling back on what kept him fed before he made it big, Damien sings for his supper outside Finnegan’s, an Irish pub on the pier, and he soon falls in with the owner, Sionn Murphy. Damien doesn’t need a complication like Sionn, and to make matters worse, the gunman—who doesn’t mind going through Sionn or anyone else if that’s what it takes kill Damien—shows up to finish what he started.