A Kiss of Venom by Beena Khan

⭐⭐⭐💫

The second and final book I read for the Mafia Romance Readathon was A Kiss of Venom by Beena Khan. This is the first book in her Black Widow series. This covered the prompts Bratva mafia, new to you author, tattooed hero and outsider to the mafia. I also applied this to the Love Has Sprung board 2 prompt kiss in the title and the Taylor Swift Quarterly Challenge prompt Out of the Woods (set in an urban city).

Ghislaine is awoken from a three-year coma by a beautiful "prince." He is Alexander, the leader of the Bratva in New York. When she awakens, Ghislaine has a lot of things to work through since not only has she lost three years of her and her daughter's life, but the car accident that put her in a coma took her husband's life. When she gets back to her job as an FBI Agent, she is reassigned the case she was working on with her husband. It turns out that the stranger that kissed her awake isn't a stranger at all, but the man behind the Bratva that they've been trying to take down. When Alexander saves Ghislaine from an assault by the new FBI Director, they become partners and just can't seem to stay away from each other.

So, I was very intrigued by this due to the blurb and seeing that it was a Sleeping Beauty retelling and a romance between a Bratva boss and an FBI Agent. While there were a lot of those points that were intriguing about the story, I was left feeling a little bored and even skimmed/sped read about 35% of the middle of the book. I liked Ghislaine and it was really cool to read a romance where the heroine was Moroccan and still in touch with her culture. I can think of a couple Arab main characters in romance that I've read before, but they were either mixed races or very westernized. Here it was really fun to get a lot more of the cultural nuances in the more day to day feel.

What I wasn't expecting was so much of the beginning was for Ghislaine to be dealing with re-entering society. There were quite a few small time jumps throughout the book, I think I would've preferred having a longer time jump in the beginning and coming back to Ghislaine more re-established in her life but still having small PTSD or issues from her coma. My biggest issue I feel like with the book was though that it was just so long and the writing style was a little long-winded and over descriptive. I just found myself a lot of the times thinking "Okay, let's get to the action." I also really didn't like how back and forth that Ghislaine was about her relationship with Alexander. There were also times where she just really felt dumber than she was telling the reader she was. It just was super weird. 

Even though I said a lot of detractors I found with the book, I was intrigued by the overall plot to keep going. I don't know if I'll pick up more in this series, but I certainly want to try some of her other works to see how the style might differ. I'll have to keep an eye out for any newer releases in a different sub-genre or trope.

Have you read A Kiss of Venom?

Bookishly Yours,

Stasi🍎

STATISTICS: A Kiss of Venom, Beena Khan, 3.5-stars, 1 day, eBook, 498 pages, published in 2021, indie published