Every Move by Ellie Marney

Summary from Goodreads:

Rachel Watts is suffering from recurring nightmares about her near-death experience in London. She just wants to forget the whole ordeal, but her boyfriend, James Mycroft, is obsessed with piecing the puzzle together and anticipating the next move of the mysterious Mr Wild - his own personal Moriarty.

So when Rachel's brother, Mike, suggests a trip back to their old home in Five Mile, Rachel can't wait to get away. Unfortunately it's not the quiet weekend she was hoping for with the unexpected company of Mike's old school buddy, the wildly unreliable Harris Derwent.

Things get worse for Rachel when Harris returns to Melbourne with them - but could Harris be the only person who can help her move forward? Then a series of murders suggests that Mr Wild is still hot on their tails and that Mycroft has something Wild wants - something Wild is prepared to kill for.

Can Watts and Mycroft stay one step ahead of the smartest of all criminal masterminds? The stage is set for a showdown of legendary proportions...

Review:

I’ve had a blast reading this series. This book was so hard to get my hands on. I had to special-order it from Australia because apparently it wasn’t ever sold here? And it took weeks to get to me. It was hard waiting to read this after the super dark and disturbing end of book 2.

I did not like this last installment as much as I liked the second. It’s weird because I feel like I didn’t like the first book as much as the rest of the world. Then, I got what everyone was talking about with book 2. And then this one happened, and I was a little disappointed. I still enjoyed it. It’s rare that I like the sequel more than the first and third books.  I did not read it as quickly as I was wanting to. It took me over a week to read! I think I read book 2 in one sitting.

There’s the good, the bad, and the ugly here. The good is all the focus on family! I loved watching Watts’ mother slowly come to terms with her daughter growing up. I loved Watts’ relationship with her brother. I also loved that Mycroft had the opportunity to work on his relationship with his family. So much of the family element was missing in book 2, when the main characters went to London. And I missed it.

I also loved the darkness again. Nothing that happened in London was forgotten, sugar-coated or passed over. Watts and Mycroft are both dealing with the after-effects of some serious stuff that went down. There are both mental and physical after-effects and I like that these were taken seriously. I also love that watts decided she needed to learn self-defense. I liked that she was taking some power into her own hands here. I also liked that she knew what she could and couldn’t handle in regards to Mycroft continuing his digging.

I hated Harris’s character. No scratch that. I didn’t hate him. I hated the weird love triangle he was supposed to start up. I really wish there wasn’t a love triangle here. I can sometimes be a mega love triangle fan too. Here, it just didn’t work. It was thrown in randomly in the last book for no real reason, in my opinion, but to add some un-needed drama to an already dramatic situation.

And now for the ugly: I also hated the lack of mystery. Pretty much the mysteries had all been solved in book 2. This book was just about the bad guy from book 2 coming back to get revenge on Mycroft and Watts in Australia. And Mycroft and Watts go about a sort of “Home Alone” way of dealing with it. Basically, on Watts’ home territory, they set up lots of juvenile traps (granted with real, adult weapons).

It just felt so, well, juvenile. The second book felt so very adult. And then comes this book where I literally just made a “Home Alone” reference. I wanted more problem solving, more mystery, and more plot. I never truly felt like the characters had enough reason to do what they did without telling the police, either…It seemed kind of forced to me. And the bad guys seemed too stupid for being the master chess players they were supposed to be.

Also, so much time was spent on setting up the traps and none of that was interesting to me. I kind of skimmed a whole quarter of the book because the running from a guard tower and picking places for landmines to catch a bad guy, just wasn’t doing it for me. It all seemed too far-stretched for something that seemed like it could be handled in a much easier fashion.

The sexual tension between Mycroft and Watts was still there. Thank goodness the weird, last minute love triangle didn’t mess that up. All in all, I had mixed feelings about this last book. I loved the emphasis on family. I loved watching Watts become a stronger, smarter character. And I loved all the scenes with her and Mycroft. I did not love the love triangle. And I hated the juvenile resolution of all the very adult events. I give it a 6/10. Though, I guess I’d give the series as a whole an 8/10.