This one just wasn't for me, I'm afraid! The writing style and the subject matter was more intense than anticipated, which is on me. I do appreciate that the author didn't feel the need to make everyone in the story a "good person" though! This wouldn't discourage me from checking out another book from the author in the future though.

This is a hard one to review. I'll say first off that I don't like too many POVs in books just as a personal preference, so that was a strike against this one. The writing could also be a bit more streamlined. I will say I like the story a decent amount. It's definitely not for everyone. The characters are not good people and there are probably some people who will be angry about "romanticizing violence" or some such. There's a realism to that that I enjoy, though. No one pretends to be a good person or pretends that these are people they should be attracted to. It's nice, just needs a little bit of polishing, I think.

I don't like to give 1-star ratings to books that are not popular. It always feels like I'm nipping it in the bud, and I would have not if this book was self-published, since I'm not an evil monster that likes to crush authors' dreams apart. But this is not, and I can't believe for the love of God that this has gone through an editing process. If it has, then the editor is totally incompetent, because this looks like a first draft, and not even a clean one.

The writing is clunky, repetitive, boring, and confusing at the same time. Every sentence is structured the same, starting with a pronoun, making each scene more like a list of actions than a proper narrative. It was SO EASY to fix. So easy. But nope.
By confusing then, I mean that most of the time I couldn't figure out who was who and so on and so forth. We are introduced immediately to a great variety of characters who are not at all described in a way that will make them stick in my head. Each description is superficial, so much I had troubles understanding what Graves looked like until a good halfway through, and then I'm still not 100% sure?? Is he white? Is he Malay? Is he what? I swear either it changed every three pages, or this poor man wasn't once described in a clear, focused way. I opt for the second.
Nicholas is such a feeble, useless character that I don't even know what to say about him. Unfortunately, his ineptitude for life wasn't a plot point or a way to build his backstory, it was just... there.
The sex between them is among the cringiest I've ever read. Like, imagine trashy porn movie dialogue mixed up with oddly purple prose. So you get a weird combination of "channels of pleasure" and "breed me like a whore". Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Then, the harder note. I picked up this book to review from NetGalley because I was fascinated by the setting. I love Singapore. I won't say I know it like the back of my hand, but a little bit yes, and I know so many Singaporeans I've lost count by now. And I'm not saying the author doesn't. But... I never felt like I was back there, you know? Which was exactly what I was looking for. Singapore would have been such an amazing setting for really delving into important issues which are normally totally ignored by the genre, would have been an amazing opportunity to explore this great result of such a fascinating history of past colonialism and modern pride and national identity, of incredible technological advance and great wealth vs. the weight of a conservative culture, harsh laws and the exploitation of migrant workers.
I mean, I understand that I probably won't find these issues in a sort of what, MM romance? But... there was nothing if not some superficial glaze over a cringy story that made me even angrier.
And at this point, I would have been happy if I was just there in spirit, sweating in the heat, surprised by a midday thunderstorm. Not even that. For the whole duration of this book, I stayed with my mind 100% stuck in the fucking London in the bleak midwinter.
And that's it.

<i>I received a free copy of this book via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!</i>

This novel is just not for me. I read 27%, right past the scene where Nick sees the mob boss having sex and immediately soils his pants. The scene thereafter where the mob boss and he have a confrontation was the last straw for me.
The writer seems to think that a dangerous mob boss is a good character for an indulgent story of sex and wealth. That he would give someone like Nick the time of day is ludicrous on its own. The story was going nowhere when I stopped reading. At least it was going nowhere I wanted to go.
Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC.

When this started I had no idea what was going on. I like to have clear ideas of characters, what they look like or what they sound like, because I want to picture them in my head. I couldn’t get a clear idea of what these characters even looked like. How old was Nick? I knew more information was coming about him as I read but I felt lost at first.

I had a very hard time with who Graves was. He’s described as a giant by Nick at first. A giant with a bald head and face tattoos. That is not much of a description and I wasn’t impressed. I learned more of where he was from and his heritage so that made him click more in my mind.

I’m not a huge fan of more than the main characters telling the story and this has other characters POV’s. It seemed messy to me. I felt like I couldn’t enjoy the book because I couldn’t sit back and let it flow.

Nick seemed so young and immature throughout the entire book and Graves had so many titles and different names being thrown around. My head hurt while I was reading and for someone like me, who has attention issues, the information dump was an overload.

In the end I never connected with this story. There was so much potential for me to like it but I felt thrown in from the start, like the story had begun before I started reading, and I just never could catch up. It took too long for Nick & Graves to get together. There is sex between the MC and other characters, one of them being a female. I know this doesn’t work for everyone so I wanted to mention it.

The book ends with an epilogue that promises more to come. If you read and enjoy this there is a lot of action and more of the story of Graves and Nick to come. I hope to check out the next book because like I said, there was so much potential for me. The writing is solid I just wish the story felt more cohesive to me.