Twisted Obsession by S. Massery

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

My name is Melody Cameron. Or so I’ve been told.

When I wake up in the hospital with no memories, I’m shipped off to Denver to live with a distant cousin who knows nothing about me. If family can’t help me remember my past, who will?

I don’t expect it to be a gorgeous hockey player 10 years younger than me. He knows things about me he has no right to know.

Yet, he still keeps secrets. He makes me work for every answer while he unlocks my desire—and fear.

Still. I’m blind. Naive. And when his twisted obsession becomes apparent, it’s too late. For both of us.

Twisted Obsession

“Step one, move her into my condo. Step two, make sure she never leaves.”

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 🖤💙❤️
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📘
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌍
Character development: 😄🙂🥰
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration type: Dual Narration

The Hero: Jacob Rhodes – He is a hockey player on the Colorado Titans NHL team. Prior to getting drafted, he played for Crown Point University while attending college. While there, he fell in love with one of his professors and they had an affair, but when she up and left with no word, he was nearly destroyed. He couldn’t find her, so he decided to put all his effort and energy into hockey. He thought he found her a year ago, but it turned out to be a dead end. Then one day while in the NHL playoffs, he sees her in the stands.

The heroine: Melody Cameron – she went with her cousin to New York city to see if it held any memories since he told her she used to live there, but nothing looked familiar to her. When they go to a hockey game between New York and Colorado, they see that one of the players seems to be staring at her. Three months ago she woke up in the hospital with no memory of who she was. She had injuries which included seventeen stitches in her head and a horizontal cut across her throat and handprints all over. The doctors said it looked like she was hit by a car and someone tried to finish her off.

The Story: Melody was put into the custody of her older cousin Thomas when she was released from the hospital, though her memory hasn’t gotten any better since then. Her cousin hasn’t been much help since he didn’t know her well and wouldn’t give her any information on what happened to her parents. So, when a young guy comes up to her while she is on a bathroom break at the hockey game, she wants to know how he knows her. Miles Whiteshaw is his name and the hockey player that was staring at her comes out and is mad at her because she didn’t recognize him. She finds out his name is Jacob, and she sees him again a few nights later and he answers some of her questions.

I really liked the first audiobook in this series, and the narrators, so I bought the rest of the series without even looking at the blurbs. However, if I would have looked, I probably wouldn’t have bought this book. It has so many things I dislike, a heroine that is a decade older than the Hero, the professor/student romance trope, a heroine with amnesia. Also, this series is chock full of very obsessive psycho stalker anti-Heroes, so the idea of a hero stalking a woman with amnesia sounded very crazy to me.

Jacob is devious, so he doesn’t tell Melody everything. He doesn’t want to lose her again, so he doesn’t want to bring up Crown Point. He lost her once and didn’t know why she left so he wants more control this time. He thinks the man she was with at the last game was her husband not her cousin. Jacob finds out pretty quickly that he isn’t her husband when he breaks into her house and sees her sleeping alone in her bed. From the past, he does know she was married at one time. He doesn’t know what happened to the husband who once confronted Jacob.

Like the other books in this series, I am not fond of Jacob’s pursuit of Melody at the beginning of this one. From his inner commentary, we know that she used to like his obsessive pursuit when she was his professor. Though now, he breaks into her house and leaves evidence he has been there. She is a girl who lost her memory in a brutal attack where someone tried to murder her, yet he is scaring her by letting her know a man was in her room while she slept. Then Jacob drugs and rapes her to make her think her cousin did it, so she runs to him for help. It seems beyond cruel to me. Though we later find out that in the past she liked his kinks, and he does eventually tell her what he did to her, and she doesn’t throw a fit about it, she pretty much just accepts it.

In this book, I don’t like the kinks of this couple. Both of them are in to sexual degradation and humiliation, which I really hate, also sex in public places. It doesn’t help that the heroine likes it also, because I am not into any of that and even reading about it makes me cringe. And though I am fine with other people having kinks as long as it is consensual, I just done get some of them. This was definitely my least favorite book of this series. Which is funny because it got the best Goodreads rating so far of the series. So, I guess other people don’t have the same triggers as I do.

Also, I couldn’t get over how stupid both Jacob and Melody are. She was nearly murdered, possibly by her husband, but definitely by someone she doesn’t know since she lost her memory. Then someone texts her with a threat, but still, she goes out walking around by herself in public. I mean he could definitely afford a guard. Though I definitely like the part of this series where each of the heroine’s has someone dangerous after them. I like the fact that there is a lot of suspense near the end of each book. I also think that there are way too many sexy scenes in each of these books, there seems to be one or more in nearly every chapter. I like a lot of steam in a romance but not so much that it overwhelms the story and I end up fast forwarding through the intimate scenes.

This audiobook was told in dual points of view via dual narration and was narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Kylie Stewart. Teddy Hamilton is one of my favorite male narrators, he is completely believable as a twenty-something hockey player, and he does great dirty talk. Kylie Stewart has a nice voice that is clear and feminine, and she does sound believable as the older woman, though not too old.

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