Review: Bound by Hatred (Born in Blood Mafia Chronicles #3) by Cora Reilly

Print Length: 196 pages

Published: April 28, 2015

From Goodreads.com: When Gianna watched her sister Aria getting married to a man she barely knew, she promised herself she wouldn’t let the same thing happen to her. 

Matteo – The Blade – Vitiello set his eyes on Gianna the moment he saw her on his brother Luca’s wedding, and Rocco Scuderi is more than willing to give his daughter to him, but Gianna has no intention of marrying for any other reason than love. A few months before the wedding, Gianna escapes her bodyguards and runs away. She has enough money to flee to Europe and begin a new life. But staying undetected when the mob is searching for her is a challenge that takes everything, especially as one of their best hunters and assassins is after her: Matteo Vitiello. 

After six months on the run, Gianna finally settles into a tentative routine in Munich, but then Matteo and a couple of her father’s soldiers find her with another man. 

Despite her pleads they kill her boyfriend, and Gianna is forced to marry Matteo. Her emotions alternating between guilt over having dragged an innocent into her world and hatred toward Matteo, Gianna is determined to make life hell for her husband. But Matteo is a master at mind games and their struggle for power soon turns into hate-fueled nights of passion. 

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My Rating: 1 star out of 5

I still have one more book to go in this series - and they have already gone from 3 stars to 2 and now they are down to 1 star. Honestly - I'm scared to read book 4. You can't really get lower than 1 star and I keep hoping that these books will fulfill the promise that book one held. 

The one redeeming quality to this story was the ending. That was the moment when the characters were defined for me. Up until then I didn't really care about any of them. Gianna came across as very whiny and not someone who could care about anyone else. And Matteo? He showed some promise in the way he was still willing to marry her - but even that came across more as "for spite" than anything else. There didn't seem to be any real feelings between these characters, and even the sex became overkill. 

I still have at least one more (published) story in this series to go. Lets hope for the best. 

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Bound by Hatred is available from Amazon.com