the one where I yap about books pt 1
hehe *sweats nervously*
*Sitcom voice* In this week’s episode, we shall be navigating Chineme’s best books of the year (round of applause please).
I read(reed) a lot. I’ve read(red) about 145 books this year so far (classes are boring and I read(red) in the middle of a lot of classes this year to pass the lecture time. I also read(red) during exam period. Bottomline, I graduated).
Now without further ado, the book recommendations (because I will be narrating my thoughts on each so you’ll pick it up)
Warning, this is going to be a longer read than usual because if you think I talk a lot normally, then I haven’t spoken to you about a book I actually love (I have once sent an hour long voicenote narrating a series, along with my thoughts. I should start a podcast). But seriously, its a long read. I’m sorry.
TOP FIVE BOOK SERIES
NO 5: THE NATURALS by JENNIFER LYNN BARNES
This series had me screaming in my pillow when I finished it because the plot twist twisted my arms, my feet, my tongue my intestines and my brain. I was in awe, I was in shock and I was so angry I wanted to jump into the book and kill the person who twisted the plot.
The four-book series follows Cassie Hobbes who gets recruited to join an FBI special program because she has a gift of profiling people (she learned it young, from her mom who was a fortune teller, and her mom used it to scam people to make money). There she meets Dean (another profiler), Lia (human lie detector), Sloane (human computer) and Michael (emotion reader).
They’re supposed to solve cold cases but as teenagers do, (they’re between seventeen and nineteen I think), they said they wanted to try real cases andinvolved themselves.
Cassie does have a brief love triangle with Michael and Dean and I love that they didn’t drag it out and ended it in book one.
For each book, the case that they’re focused on solving ties to one of the kids’ background and trauma that made then what they are. The first book’s case was hers’, the second Dean’s, the third Sloane’s and the fourth had elements of Lia and Michael. All four books had a running story in the background that came to light in the fourth book and tied the entire story up with a cute, bloody bow.
The book is a little graphic because it deals with murder and serial killers and the whole nine yards. It has found family and romance as a subplot.
Bottomline, it’s really good. You should give it a read (as you can see I gave it a read, and bought the hard copy so I could give it more reads)
NO 4: MONSTER TRILOGY by RINA KENT
I was in my dark-romance (I don’t want to hear a peep) bag for the second half of this year and I decided to read a book I had been seeing on TikTok. Unfortunately for me the book had like twenty-eight predecessors. They were not necessary to the understanding of the book but I knew if I didn’t read all, I would read the book and see a bunch of inside jokes I didn’t understand and I have very strong FOMO. So I read everything.
Granted most of the predecessors were rinse and repeat with a few elements changed (even the book that highlighted me to the existence of them all), but this trilogy was soo good, me and a few other comrades on the internet are wondering if the author had a ghost writer (that’s how good and different from her other works it was)
The trilogy follows Sasha Ivanova who is undercover in the Russian military as a man, because she wanted to get more information on why her family was massacred and to be able to execute revenge. She runs into Kirill, the son of one of the top Bratva bosses and the captain of the special forces. who immediately tells she’s a girl but refuses to call her on her bluff.
A botched mission, some pretending and the death of Kirill’s father takes Kirill and his team to New York, where the Bratva operates from. Sasha holds her identity and a slightly feminine looking man, and continues to serve as his bodyguard meanwhile, they’re falling in love and fucking like bunnies in every corner.
That’s all I’ll say about the trilogy, anything else is a spoiler.
My only issue was that, if Kirill was the only person that supposedly knew she was a girl yeah, did the other members of his team think he was gay? They were always together, bantering half the time (Kirill is described as someone you can’t talk back to cause he’s scary) and they repeatedly fucked in the backseat of the car with his other men at the front seat.
Regardless of that I did love Kirill and Sasha. Kirill was infected by the sassy men apocalypse. The man was willing to do ANYTHING as long as she was by his side. And after reading about helpless women with hidden strength, Sasha was like a breath of fresh air. Granted she did have moments where I wanted to smack her upside in the head (she wanted to go to the sauna with men and Kirill had to remind her that her bodily anatomy was not the same as theirs), she was a strong, no nonsense (sometimes) person. She wore her heart on an armoured sleeve and that was so beautiful to see.
So yeah, even if you want to skip any of Rina’s works, read this one (and maybe deception trilogy, that was good too plot-wise. Its not on the list cause I didn’t connect with the characters and half the time I wished the female main character went through with her suicide attempt)
NO 3: DARKVERSE SERIES by RUNYX
They can use enemies-to-lovers to trap me into reading a book. I’m that simple. And that was what got me into the first book of this series.
Darkverse is a six-book series that follows four couples. Tristan and Morana(first two books), Dante and Amara(third book), Alpha and Zephyr(fourth book), and Dainn and Luna(fifth book). The sixth book just wraps up the entire story.
Tristan and Morana were so sparky-sparky-boom-boom and a perfect hook into the world RuNyx was trying to create. She was the daughter of a mafia boss and he was a high ranking member of the adversary Mafia, feared in the underworld for being ruthless.
So he had this whole thing where he wanted to kill her after they first met, but kept delaying it cause she was useful to him (she actually turned him on against his will). A few times of him actually protecting her, and he became her safe space.
Morana to me, was the best form of mafia female love interest. She wasn’t frail or stupid. She was logical, smart and self aware (and she was a tech sis). And reading her made me happy cause I knew that the rest of the main characters would have sense too.
Dante (the son of the Tristan’s mafia boss) and Amara (daughter of the head housekeeper) were a typical forbidden love where my man did everything to be with her even though circumstance (his father) didn’t allow them be together.
Alpha and Zephyr’s story was set in another city, away from Dante, Tristan, Amara and Morana. Theirs was a second chance romance with Zephyr being from a regular home and stepping into the underworld just to be with the man she’d once loved and lost (Alpha didn’t even remember her. Zephyr was a lovergirl at heart)
Dainn and Luna, the fifth book in the series, was also set in a different city. Dainn is basically a psychopath and has a hyperfixation on Luna because she trusted him as a total stranger. Anything else I say is a spoiler but they got together sha.
Now while this series has romantic element, they play out in tandem with the subplot, where they’re trying to find out more about an organization, that captures children and uses them for sex trafficking, and end it. The books are dark and has really heavy topics surrounding the evil minds of men. Luna was one of those children stolen from her house at night and has been raised in it since she was three years old (if your mind can’t handle this last paragraph trust me these books aren’t for you)
I initially read this, before the last book was released, in June, and read all five again, after the last book was released, in November, so I could flow seamlessly into the last one.
This series would have been ranked higher but the last book was so mid with how it ended the story. It was a bow nonetheless but it wasn’t cute, it was just tied. I still love the series with all my heart, the last book just barely exists to me.
*takes deep breath, drinks water, then continues*
NO 2: VILLIANS DUET by V. E. SCHWAB
Oh my goodness gracious. Anytime I think of these books, the unadulterated joy and awe I feel, is unmatched.
V. E. Schwab is an author I liked from the moment I read(red) ‘The Invisible Life Of Addie LaRue’ three years ago, so seeing her name pasted on the books make me almost certain I would love it cause I loved her writing style (and I did).
Villians consist of two books; Vicious and Vengeful (I heard there might be a third book but I’m not sure. It doesn’t end on a cliff-hanger sha). Its a sci-fi book(my first sci-fi) about two best friends who toy with the idea of mortality.
In this universe, people who have near death experiences wake up with their body change, a part of their brain opened and have powers. These people are called Extraordinary, EO for short.
Eli and Victor are two college roommates who have the same psychology class. They tend to one-up each other academically and that’s where the story starts, when Eli says he wants to study EOs as his project topic. Victor, not wanting to be left behind says he’ll help and together they scour the internet for brief sightings of these EO people
They get some data and find out the only common denominator is the fact that all these people were initially thought to be dead and then were alive again. And do you know what these boys do? They decide to make a controlled near death situation in their dorm room (did I fail to mention that Eli is a disguised psychopath and Victor is a sociopath? Oops).
Victor in his one-up glory decided to go first. Swallows a bunch of drugs, but Eli got afraid of his unresponsiveness and took him to the hospital. So they tried another way, with Eli. They drowned him. It also didn’t work. No powers. Victor says let’s try again, Eli says no. Victor goes to a mutual friend and convinces her to electrocute him. It works. He has a power. He can transfer pain by touch, which he found out when he touched his friend, transferred to much pain into her and she died.
Victor calls Eli in panic, tells him, ‘the friend is dead, lets hide the body’. Eli says no. Eli calls the cops, that his friend is crazy. Victor finds how to get back to the dorm and as they fight, we find out that Eli did get powers from the drowning. The ability to regenerate and heal immediately (that wolverine shit).
Victor gets thrown into jail and Eli pushes the professor of the psychology class down the stairs(he died) and destroys every proof of that project report. And then the first half of the first book ends (the second half begins ten years after the incidents of the first).
If you want more, go read it (now y’all will see why I love the fuck out of those books that I had to get them). I never imagined that I’ll fall so in love with something that wasn’t romance. Like not even an inkling of, and I was head over heels. I look at the books on my shelf and smile a secret smile cause only me knows the amount of love I made with that book. Seriously, go read it.
NO 1: MINDFUCK SERIES by S. T. ABBY
Female serial killer and I’m sat. And that is exactly what this book is (its actually a bunch of five really short novels that total about 600 pages aka the shortest series in this list)
Lana Myers is a serial killer who the police are having a hard time tracking down (because she is a badass bitch in a male dominated field and all the sexist police people think the unsub is a man).
She starts seeing a policeman, Logan who is working on that case. He finds her intriguing and like a little mouse (it was always so funny when she was helping him solve her case saying shit with maybe, knowing fully well she kills these people)
So Lana has a kill list of men, the police links all the kills to the same unsub after her like sixth or so kill. The men on her list are not innocent. They were all involved in a brutal gangrape of her and her brother when she was a teenager in her small cultlike town. The men never got justice and her brother died after he had driven them to the hospital.
I feel like this is a good place to stop. I would just like to say, if you’re against reading the castration of bad men in very graphic details, to which clearly I am not (cut off his dick and feed it to him please), don’t read this book. She takes her time torturing each man before she lets them bleed to death (the amount of glee this brought me scared me, honestly. I felt so much joy during the torture I was afraid for myself. I’m normal I swear. Eww, blood).
Unfortunately, the author died in a car crash a few years back (May Her Soul Rest In Peace). Stabby (S.T.Abby. Get it?) was one of her three pennames and she has more books in the other two.
Okay I’m done. I truly didn’t expect this to be this long especially as I didn’t read only series this year and I have other categories of books. There will unfortunately (if you didn’t like this) or fortunately (if you did) be a part two.
Considering I’ve taken so much time, Toodles.
I swear I don’t stop talking when it comes to books. Sigh
Thanks for this boss, I'll definitely be adding some of these to my list
Also, the monster trilogy seems like BL for cowards. (I actually heard someone use that while talking about an anime and I've been waiting to work it into a conversation)
I started the Mindfuck series about a year ago but never finished it because I thought it was too boring. I think I'll go read it again now👀