This RITA® Reader Challenge 2017 review was written by Roo. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romantic Suspense category.

Here is Roo's review:

So I need to start this review with a whole host of content warnings.

Rape mentions including: sexual abuse/rape of children and teens, sexual slavery of children and teens, and prison/revenge rape (i.e. the Heroine “hopes” one of the antagonists is repeatedly assaulted in prison as a punishment for him taking part in the enslavement/abuse)

Emotional abuse/manipulation

Alcoholism (with some emotional abuse attached to it)

Dubious/lack of consent between the Hero and Heroine (their first sex scene occurs when drunk)

Now you don’t see the rape or sexual abuse as it is happening. However, it’s all very central to the plot and it’s talked about frequently. This includes some brief descriptions of what acts took place.

The Summary

Atone begins with Beau Hollis summarizing the events of the first book in Yarnell’s Reclaimed Innocence series. He had been wrongly convicted of his girlfriend’s rape and murder and, after six years in prison, his sister has proven his innocence. Now a free man, Beau joins the private investigation firm his sister works for and quickly takes up Vera Swain’s case. Vera is looking for her younger half-sister, Marie, before she ages out of the foster care system.

Vera’s simple story, however, quickly falls apart as Beau discovers that Vera Swain is an assumed identity. She assures Beau that she is legitimately concerned for Marie, who really is her half-sister. It’s only the name Vera Swain that is false, and Beau believes her (because insta-lust=insta-trust).

Over the course of the novel, the rest of the truth comes out in pieces, until we know that Vera was manipulated into sexual slavery at age 14 and the man who did it, Javier Abano (because of course the White/Euro-American protagonists’ antagonist is Hispanic), is doing the same thing to Marie.

The Review

Originally, I planned on giving this something like a C+. Not a story I will return to, but also not a story I hated. Average, maybe a step above. There were some tropes and little details that I liked. You’ve got a burly, angsty Alpha-Hero. You’ve got a competent Heroine who knows how to protect herself. Both have lost significant portions of their youth/innocence and there are little scenes of them reclaiming it (e.g. holding hands/swinging their hands back and forth as they walk or having a shared first-hangover experience with each other). There were also big issues that I think Yarnell worked well with (e.g. Beau’s struggles with going back to a ‘normal’ life after prison and the ways Beau and his sister respond to their father’s alcoholism).

But, to be completely honest, writing this summary and review just made me kinda mad at Atone.

First of all, for Romantic Suspense, it wasn’t all that suspenseful. There was crime, the Hero and Heroine’s lives were threatened, but Yarnell definitely failed to make me wonder what would happen next. Part of this had to do with the alternating first person point of view. You know exactly what Beau and Vera are thinking at all times. Considering the degree to which the ‘mystery’ of the plot relies on Vera being secretive, the suspense falls flat when she tells the reader what’s going on. But even the plot was pretty predictable. I get that avoiding this is a bit difficult in a genre known for mostly-guaranteed happy endings, but the combination of a predictable plot line and the protagonists explaining their thoughts/feelings/secrets left little, if anything, to the imagination.

Yarnell also skipped over a lot of the actual investigation part of the plot. Every few chapters there would be a reveal – either someone would admit to something or there would be some expository dialogue – that felt more like an info dump to move the plot along in between bouts of Vera and Beau opining about their pasts and their feelings for each other.

This – combined with sheer volume and the use of often crass/demeaning language – led to a lot of the discussions of sexual abuse seeming gratuitous. Yes, the plot involves the Beau and Vera trying to save Marie from the same sex slavery operation that Vera endured. You wouldn’t be able to tell that story without at least mentioning that sexual abuse takes place, but it sometimes seems like that’s all there is to this book. This is only made worse by Beau’s backstory and character development including rape as well. He has to work on his feelings toward his murdered girlfriend in order to begin a relationship with Vera. But this girlfriend wasn’t just murdered, she was raped and murdered, which just makes the mentions of sexual abuse/assault all that more frequent. It would be one thing if it felt like all of it contributed to the story or any significant character development. Instead, it just feels like adding terrible things to make the story feel ‘gritty’ and ‘dark’ for the sake of being ‘gritty’ and ‘dark.’

There’s also the issue of insta-lust and, as mentioned earlier, the resulting insta-trust. Vera, a survivor of sexual slavery who mentions multiple times how much she distrusts men, knows from the moment that they meet that Beau is Different and Not-Like-Other-Men. Beau figures out that Vera is lying about her identity and is constantly blindsided by relevant information that she doesn’t tell him, but he knows he can trust her because he has “a pretty accurate bullshit detector.” Vera carries a gun on her because she’s afraid of her past catching up to her and Beau’s response is: “This isn’t the life she chose, it was forced on her, but by whom or what? I remind myself that the answers to those questions don’t matter.” What? Beau, you’ve met her once for maybe an hour, tops. How is that a reasonable response for someone who you are not just working for, but also romantically interested in? One’s past might not define who they are, but I wouldn’t recommend getting into a relationship where your partner thinks their life is in danger without figuring out what’s going on.

In the end, the ridiculousness of the insta-lust plot line makes for a strange combination with the repetitive dark imagery. Having characters tell their stories and describe how screwed up they are – and they both do this multiple times – only goes so far. When that doesn’t translate into how they actually act, when their insta-lust completely overrides their supposed self-preservation instincts, it tends to negate any impact the horrible backstory could have.

Overall, the more I think about the novel the more frustrated I am with it. Generally, one of the best compliments I give media of any stripe is that I wish I could forget it entirely, so that I can experience it for the first time again. When it comes to Atone, I wish I could forget it entirely and then never pick it up.