New Year's Retribution (Coyote Valley Book 3)

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Vicent Morris

Getting married is supposed to be the happiest day of your life. Getting married inside a co-ed prison, surrounded by people who have complicated reasons to want things to go wrong, is something else entirely. Jan Sloane knows exactly what she is doing with that setup, and New Year's Retribution wastes absolutely no time proving it.

Keri Quinn has come a long way from the gossip tabloid employee who first stumbled into Coyote Valley on an undercover assignment. By the third book she is a woman who knows this world intimately, its power dynamics, its hidden loyalties, its capacity to turn on you without warning, and that hard-won knowledge makes her an even more compelling protagonist than she was at the beginning. The wedding that opens the book should feel like an arrival. Instead it feels like a door swinging open onto something dangerous, which is exactly right.

What Sloane does particularly well across this series is hold the romance and the suspense in genuine tension rather than letting one dominate the other. The love story between Keri and Trevor is real and earned. But the institutional world surrounding them is equally real, and New Year's Retribution leans into that tension harder than any previous installment. A ruthless new power player in the prison. A suspicious veterinarian whose motives don't quite add up. Jared caught in the middle of something he can't fully explain. Everyone keeping secrets, including the people Keri trusts most.

Sloane said she wanted to write about what it means to protect the people you love when honesty is not an option. That is exactly what this book delivers, and it delivers it with the kind of morally complex, emotionally charged energy that fans of Orange Is the New Black will recognize immediately.

For readers who have been following Keri from the beginning, this installment is deeply satisfying. For anyone new to the series, it is a very good reason to start from book one.