Review: Monster in His Eyes by J.M. Darhower

The Blurb:

Ignazio Vitale is not a good man.

I suspect it, the first time I see him, sense the air of danger that surrounds the man. He has a way of commanding attention, of taking control, of knowing what I'm thinking before I even do.

It's alarming and alluring. It's dark and deadly. It's everything I've ever wanted but the last thing I truly need. Obsession.

It doesn't take him long to draw me into his web, charming me into his bed and trapping me in his life, a life I know nothing about until it's too late. He has secrets, secrets I can't fathom, secrets that make it so I can't walk away, no matter how much I beg him to let me go. I see it sometimes in his eyes, a darkness that's both terrifying and thrilling. He's a monster, wrapped up in a pretty package, and what I find when I unmask him changes everything.

I want to hate him.

Sometimes, I do.

But it doesn't stop me from loving him, too.




I wanted to like this more. I didn’t hate it. I just…didn’t love it.

I was really intrigued at the idea of Naz. But to be honest, Karissa’s whole Bella Swan vibe was irritating the shit out of me and really detracted from other interesting areas that could have been explored. We are overwhelmed with the minutia of her daily life for longer than necessary, the frequent “I don’t knows” and “Huhs” and “Okays” got on my nerves after a while. I assume it’s one way of conveying Karissa’s emotional immaturity (because she’s barely legal jailbait). But it gets tiresome and you find yourself wanting to kick her in the shins every time she completely ignores or misses something obvious as hell.



It’s true what everyone else says in the other reviews, the plot gets more compelling a little more than halfway in, but by that point I was rather hoping Naz would just put the girl out of her (our) misery.

Mild spoiler ahead, nothing major (even though it perhaps should have been):

Though it becomes obvious early on that Naz’s job isn’t exactly on the up and up, Karissa remains willfully ignorant for much of the book. From what I could see, she’s willfully ignorant about a lot of things in general. For instance, what kind of person just rolls with it when your best friend starts dating a guy that tried to roofie you? Karissa even gets a confirmation of that fact later on…and still she just uses it to her temporary advantage rather than spare a worry for her friend. And as for her friend, how do you get into a relationship with a guy that you even think tried to drug your roommate? I feel like even Naz would show more concern for the people he cares about than these girls.



The sex scenes are kind of short and don’t really convey the level of intimacy that’s been insisted upon between the two…until that one scene. You know which one I mean. Whoa.

“I love you, too. Promise me you’ll remember that.”
“I promise.”
“Good,” he says. “Because I’m about to fuck you like I don’t.”



It ends with an interesting cliffy, but I’m still not 100% convinced I need to explore it further at this point.