WIJFR: Nothing Left to Lose (NS)

denmanam

I just finished Nothing Left to Lose by Kirsty Moseley, and I feel like it took FOREVER. I found the premise interesting to start:

Annabelle Spencer's life is every girl's dream. She has wonderful parents, great friends, and of course the perfect boyfriend, Jack Roberts. That all changes on her sixteenth birthday when her life comes crashing down around her. Her dream night turns into a nightmare when Jack is murdered right in front of her, and she’s kidnapped by his murderer, Carter Thomas, a big time drug and arms dealer.

After ten months of being with Carter, she’s found, but the experience has totally changed her. She’s no longer the happy-go-lucky girl that everyone used to know and love; she’s now cold, hard and suffers from night terrors. It appears that Carter broke not only her body, but her spirit too. A shadow of her former self, her slogan for life is now: ‘If you don’t care about anything, then you have nothing to lose’.

Carter is currently serving time for the murder of Jack, a conviction that Anna helped secure. But his retrial is coming up because some key evidence appears to have been tampered with. Unbeknown to Anna, death threats are being received by her father, the Senator. It appears that Carter is still interested in Anna and will stop at nothing to get her back.

Ashton Taylor is brought in to protect her. He’s a newly qualified SWAT agent, a bright spark, the agency’s new golden boy. He is assigned undercover, posing as her boyfriend. His job is to help her through college and keep her safe until the end of the trial in eight months’ time.

For three years she has been the broken, damaged girl, refusing to feel emotion or pain, but can Ashton help her rebuild her life and finally deal with the grief of losing her childhood sweetheart? Will he be the one to make her see that life is, in fact, worth living and that not all men will hurt her?

All the while, the shadow of the trial looms over the both of them, taunting them, reminding them that it isn’t over yet. After all, Carter Thomas will stop at nothing to be reunited with his ‘Princess’.

I really enjoyed this book at first. It started out strong for me, despite some annoying bits and pieces. The story is set in the U.S., but the author used language and concepts that are distinctly English (where she is from.) There were some heavily overused words and phrases that got to be annoying after awhile. The main characters used these pet names for each other, Pretty Boy and Baby Girl. Again, I didn't mind them at first, but then they just seemed to be used too much. My biggest complaint about this book was hot FREAKING LONG it was. It was 525 pages on a Kindle. There was absolutely no need for this book to be this damn long! They could have cut out about 300 of those pages and still had a decent story. By the time the ending came along, I was so annoyed with the length of time it was taking me to read this book that I couldn't help but laugh at how unrealistic the story turned out. Without giving away any spoilers, let's just say that the author made this guy out to be like a freaking superhero.

I ended up giving this book 3 stars on Goodreads. It was okay, but I don't know that I would recommend it to anyone. If the author did some MAJOR editing and revising, I think it could have more potential.

nocturnalintimacy

OMG. I tried to read this one this weekend and I gave up halfway through. It was SOOOO long!

I really liked the premise, but the execution was lacking.

Here were the 3 big killers for me.

**SPOILER WARNING**








1. Insta-love. There's not real love story development. Both characters are guilty of this, but Ashton's is just unforgivable. He sees her, and he's all in. Ridiculous.

2. Character inconsistency. Anna is so traumatized that she can't even hug her mother, but she has sex with Ashton after knowing him for 3 days. What?! Ashton has dedicated his life to becoming SWAT, but he puts his entire career at risk after knowing Anna for 5 minutes. Seriously?

3. Overacting. Too many eye rolls, wicked laughs, and bursts of laughter. Subtlety would have added much to this story.

nocturnalintimacy

denmanam said:

I really enjoyed this book at first. It started out strong for me, despite some annoying bits and pieces. The story is set in the U.S., but the author used language and concepts that are distinctly English (where she is from.) There were some heavily overused words and phrases that got to be annoying after awhile. The main characters used these pet names for each other, Pretty Boy and Baby Girl. Again, I didn't mind them at first, but then they just seemed to be used too much. My biggest complaint about this book was hot FREAKING LONG it was. It was 525 pages on a Kindle. There was absolutely no need for this book to be this damn long! They could have cut out about 300 of those pages and still had a decent story. By the time the ending came along, I was so annoyed with the length of time it was taking me to read this book that I couldn't help but laugh at how unrealistic the story turned out. Without giving away any spoilers, let's just say that the author made this guy out to be like a freaking superhero.

I knew it! In my notes I wrote that the author must be foreign because aside from the spellings (colour, organisation, etc) they don't seem familiar with government branches. SWAT is local, not national, so they would never become involved in an operation like this.

denmanam

nocturnalintimacy said:

OMG. I tried to read this one this weekend and I gave up halfway through. It was SOOOO long!

I really liked the premise, but the execution was lacking.

Here were the 3 big killers for me.

**SPOILER WARNING**








1. Insta-love. There's not real love story development. Both characters are guilty of this, but Ashton's is just unforgivable. He sees her, and he's all in. Ridiculous.

2. Character inconsistency. Anna is so traumatized that she can't even hug her mother, but she has sex with Ashton after knowing him for 3 days. What?! Ashton has dedicated his life to becoming SWAT, but he puts his entire career at risk after knowing Anna for 5 minutes. Seriously?

3. Overacting. Too many eye rolls, wicked laughs, and bursts of laughter. Subtlety would have added much to this story.

All of this. They were really ridiculous. I could see Anna opening up and becoming a little more comfortable with handshakes and holding hands after having been undercover a little bit. There were also different things that Ashton did that made me want to scream, knowing that she clearly had major PTSD. I would think he was going to be smart and helpful, and then he'd just be a dumb man. I wanted to put it down and not finish, but I was also interested to see what she would do with the Carter storyline.