A Nix Review – The Mistress by Tiffany Reisz (5 Stars)

The final book in The Original Sinners Series – The Red Years.

There’s punishment-and then there’s vengeance.

Nora Sutherlin is being held, bound and naked. Under different circumstances, she would enjoy the situation immensely, but her captor isn’t interested in play. Or pity.

As the reality of her impending peril unfolds, Nora becomes Scheherazade, buying each hour of her life with stories-sensual tales of Søren, Kingsley and Wesley, each of whom has tempted and tested and tortured her in his own way. This, Nora realizes, is her life: nothing so simple, so vanilla, as a mere love triangle for her. It’s a knot in a silken cord, a tangled mass of longings of the body and the heart and the mind. And it may unravel at any moment.

But in Nora’s world, no one is ever truly powerless-a cadre of her friends, protectors and lovers stands ready to do anything to save her, even when the only certainty seems to be sacrifice and heartbreak….

FTC Disclaimer. I got this from NetGalley. I am a massive fan of this series and I wasn’t paid to do the review. Tiffany Reisz has been involved in events on the blog before.

How to review this book without spoiling the rest of the series? I can’t. Stop reading immediately and pick up The Siren. You’ll be able to tell if you want to continue the series from there. Myself? I’ve loved every chapter. This is a series that has taken me on an emotional rollercoaster and I’m pretty sad that I have to get off it for a while. The ending doesn’t make it clear if there is more to come but God what an ending it is. I still don’t know how I feel about it. In some ways in made me happy, in other ways it stunned me and a tiny part of me is a little mad that there is no pretty little bow to tie off this story-arc with. I don’t know why I expected one; nothing about these books has been easy!

So, these next paragraphs will be spoiler heavy for the previous three books. You have been warned.

We left the last book with Nora being kidnapped. In this one, she has to regale her captor (Soren’s crazy wife) with tales from the past whilst they wait for Soren and Kingsley to decide her fate. In these tales, we see the moments from Nora’s past that have stuck in her memory the most. From the night she had her first ménage with Kingsley and Soren to some of the moments with Wes, this final installment slotted some pieces together for me and made me realise that there was no one type of happy ending for the characters in this book. I also got that, as I couldn’t decide what I wanted for these characters, I should just stop predicting and roll with it!

This instalment answered so many questions. I realised why Nora made some of the choices that she did. I finally understood why she left Soren, why she chose to walk away from the one man whom she loved desperately. I also realised why Soren walked away from Kingsley. Some of the flash-backs made my happy, some made me very hot, but there were a few that made me cry. The standout message that I got from this book is that, sometimes, the only way to protect the person you care about the most is to walk away.

The last three books have led to this one, the threads being created only to be plaited together to become the ending that you’ll either love or hate. My opinions of the characters have changed so dramatically throughout this series that I had no way of realising, when reading book one, that I would be team Nora. It is very very rare that I realise that the only HEA I want is the one of the heroines choice, no matter how kinky or unconventional that may be. There isn’t a character that I didn’t grow to love but, to do this, I had to see these characters at their best and their worst. Tiffany Reisz is a very talented writer; she has to be, she made me love a Sadist!