5 stars Tangled brings the happy ending that was lacking in Twisted, but it’s a long and tense journey to get there. And it’s not as happy as I hoped it would be, but it’s certainly realistic. While trying to escape the Russian bratva, the Butorins, Tristan tries to fulfill his financial obligations to Mary Ververa Bell, the secretive villain of the story. Tristan received an ominous letter from her at the beginning of Twisted and in part two, he actually sees her, but that doesn’t happen until the end. Meanwhile, he and Colleen are falling hopelessly in love. As has become more and more common with Blair Babylon, there is plenty of social commentary thrown into the story. Some people might be turned off by it, but I like the stories even better for it. Some of the observations include Colleen arguing with her father that college is important, explaining that “more women than men are enrolling in college now, so people like you are devaluing it because it’s not just for men anymore. When Colleen tells a man she has a boyfriend as a way of rejecting potential overtures from him, she’s weighed down by the “societal implications that she had to be some other man’s property for a guy not to molest her.” Later, while considering an action that’s illegal, but necessary, Colleen’s friend wryly states, “It is not unethical, like a politician getting a briefing about a coming deadly pandemic and selling all their manufacturing stocks and buying shares in healthcare companies. Or a rich guy buying a small generic pharmaceutical company and jacking up the price of insulin or EpiPens a thousand-fold so that regular people can’t afford their medications and die. Or oil companies knowing from their own research that gasoline cars and oil-based plastic are destroying the planet that we live on but paying politicians to stomp out research and innovation in electric cars and other materials. Yeah, that’s all perfectly fine, but this is illegal. Yeah. Sure.” There are also some other fun descriptions, like when she explains that Tristan is so good at talking, he “could talk a used car salesperson into paying him to take a car off the lot.” I loved when Colleen met Maxence and his beauty is described, “...his sculpted bone structure was the natural ideal that plastic surgeons envied but could never really copy. He was a movie star and a model and a demigod, and he was somehow standing next to her.” Then he’s introduced. “The man smiled, and the heavens parted, and the angels sang.” It was so over-the-top, I had to laugh. Tristan “Twist” King is another Le Rosey graduate and Colleen Frost is another resident of Arizona—Phoenix, to be exact. Many of the characters in Blair’s stories seem to be connected in one way or another—usually from Le Rosey or Arizona, but a surprising one is referenced in this story. Angel, the protagonist in The Angel of Death, is mentioned by Colleen as a sniper on the Phoenix hostage negotiation team that she saw on TV. Why a hostage negotiator is mentioned is not a part of this review. Overall, the story is tense and packed with surprises. It’s thoroughly enjoyable. March 4, 2022
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Elizabeth J ConnorWriter. Editor. Proofreader. Archives
September 2022
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