Den of Vipers by K.A. Knight

• Pairing: MMMMF
• Orientation: Straight
• Identity: Cisgender

Warning: blood, violence, dubious consent, S&M, scenes of abuse and assault

Den of Vipers by K.A. Knight is a reverse harem dark romance revolving around four leaders of the Vipers, the most feared organization in town (no, I don’t know what town, I’m not sure it’s ever mentioned, but some town in either the U.S. or the U.K but definitely not in Asia or Russian), and the feisty, but they don’t know it yet, female that was given to them to pay off a debt. Yes, the plot does sound familiar, it’s a plot that I’ve read in any number of books since the 90’s.  But I’m not mad at the premise of the book, I’m mad at the execution and the fact that the plot is virtually nonexistent seeming only to be there as a page filler between either sex scenes or one of the characters thinking about sex and/or how horny they are.

So, Roxanne, who goes by Roxy cuz she’s so feisty, is given to the Vipers by her father to pay off his gambling debt.  Her father is a grade A douchebag.  There’s four Vipers and they are a walking cliche.  All four of them.  Ryder, the face of the organization whose cold because he was forced to grow up too fast.  Kenzo, Ryder’s brother, a consummate gambler and lover of the group.  Garrett the fighter with trust and anger issues who doesn’t trust women.  And Diesel, the crazy, funny one.  The four of them kidnap Roxy and they all fall in love in the middle of trying to keep the Triad from taking over the city.

And that took 646 pages.

There was a lot of sex in this book.  Violent sex. Bloody sex. Rough sex.  Sex on tables. Sex in the shower.  Sex against windows.  It was basically 500 pages of sex.  The other 146 is where the plot and character development was supposed to be.  Because contrary to popular belief sex, does not develop your character.

Here’s the thing: I love romance novels;  I love dark romance novels; I love smut and violence and blood, but it needs to be held together by a plot and characters that make sense and are not just caricatures of what bad mobster are supposed to be all the way down to tattooed bodies and pierced dicks.

And as much as I love smutty dark romances, I could forgive this book for all those things except when it asks me to suspend my disbelief completely and be okay without any sort of character growth.

SPOILER ALERT

About 500 pages into the book, Roxy is kidnapped.  While she is trying to get away, she’s in a car accident where her car rolls and then is either stun or drugged or somehow knocked out, honestly I don’t remember.  She is then beat up, strapped to a chair with barb wire, tortured for an undisclosed number of hours but many many, her ribs are broken, shoulder dislocated, nails pulled out and you know TORTURED.  She then manages to break her chair, free herself, and make her escape.  They men are there to save her, but because she’s so feisty and cool, she manages to mostly save herself.  She then fights her way through the building, killing anyone that crosses her path. But she’s not done yet, she also, still wearing the bloody clothes from being tortured, goes to save Garrett who was captured and kills Garrett’s ex with her bare hands.  She’s not fucking Batman.  She did not train in Ninja Mountain or with the fucking military to be able to survive hours of torture without passing out as soon as the immediate danger to her life was gone.  Adrenaline only gets you so far.

And the other thing that really made me have a very keen dislike of this book, is the absolutely nonexistent character development and growth.  The five people who meet in the first chapter of this book are exactly the same as the five people in the epilogue.  They didn’t learn anything, but how could they with the lack of any substantial plot.