Sunday, August 7, 2022

Review: Hard Limits by Suki Williams

Hard Limits by Suki Williams
Series: Queen of Hearts #1
Publication date: June 18th, 2021
Pages: 402
Spice: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

Synopsis:
Call girls are meant to fuck the client then go home, not fuck them up, but I never minded getting my hands just a little dirty.

Homeless teen turned prostitute turned elite call girl with some... unusual extracurricular activities was not what I'd set out to become, but survivors can't be choosers. Now, I've got a life for myself, and I even like it most of the time, but a favor owed to my boss/ex-lover is about to mess all of that up.

Her husband's become a problem, and when the team of men she's hired can't seal the deal, I'm brought in for some assistance. What a fucking mess. Especially since the team consists of my favorite client, his brother, my roommate, and my roommate's boyfriend.

When the shitstorm of my present starts to collide a bit too much with my past, I've got to hope my skills are sharp enough to keep me in one piece.

There's an unexpected danger that's found me once again, but lucky for me, I've always thrived in the darkness.

Trigger warning: non con, dub con, BDSM scenes, a torture scene, and other adult material that people could find triggering.


Available at:



Review:
Nicolette was happy in her life as a high priced call girl. She got to explore her hedonistic desires and got paid handsomely for it. But her boss and ex-lover was about to shake up her world, call in that favor owed to her and put Nic directly in the pathway of four handsome mercenaries in hopes of digging up dirt on her current husband and dispose of him as all the others had been. Nicolette knows enough about her boss and her husband to be able to assist the men in their mission. But little does she know that a few of the men she already was well acquainted with. The tall, hulk of a man is one of her clients and the other with a sly grin is her roommate of a few months. It seems that these men had already been in her life in one way or another and now they were meant to share even more time together. 

Along the way they also come in contact with Nic's very possessive stalker who will stop at nothing to have her for himself. But as feelings start to grow and Nic starts to wonder if she can have both her career and her relationships, she may be at risk of losing them off. Because her stalker isn't just sending love letters to her but also killing off his johns both present and past. Can the five navigate their growing attraction for each other as well as their mission to rid the world of Nic's boss's husband while Nic's stalker is also becoming a very deadly thorn in their sides?

This book is incredibly saturated with triggers so it is not for the faint of heart. The only other book I have read that had more triggers was one that had necrophilia. This one had a very small touch of that but it was more the non-con and dub-con that was the most prevalent. If you are easily trigger, you will definitely want to skip this one.

I struggled to get into the book as a whole. I am not a huge fan of relationships within the harem (IE: the men being with each other or them having sexual relations outside of the harem dynamic). So this was hard to stomach. Not only was their a relationship already established by two of the men but there were the possibility of more connections between the men and the fact that Nic was still active in her career as a call girl even after they had established they were together. This made the story a bit hard to stomach while also dealing with some very violent scenes. 

However, the plot was intriguing. The reasoning for the husband needing to be knocked off and the role Nic's boss played in all of it was never really discovered. But the pursuit of information and the knowledge base that Nic provided for them was a great way for the characters to form connections. 

The writing style, plot, and overall spicy-ness was what saved the story for me but it still wasn't at the top of my list of reads. It was middle of the road for me.