VICIOUS RUMER by Joshua Winning – Review

I received this book for free from the Author in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Vicious Rumer by Joshua Winning
Published by Unbound on April 24 2018
Genres: Adult, Thriller
Pages: 304
Format: e-book
Source: Author
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The nitty-gritty: A tense and violent thriller with surprisingly sympathetic characters and surprises at every turn, Vicious Rumer will be a hit with readers who like their stories on the gritty side.

I did a thing I don’t normally do: I accepted a review request directly from an author, and I actually had a blast reading his book! I had seen Vicious Rumer around the internet, so when Winning asked if I’d like to read it, I didn’t really hesitate at all. This was a crazy story, fast-paced and violent, with a protagonist who captured my heart despite her very rough edges.

I’m not going to say much about the story because I do want to avoid spoilers, so forgive me if this recap is rather vague! Rumer Cross has been on her own most of her life, having been abandoned by her mother at birth and put into foster care. She’s been shuffled from one family to another over the years, all bad experiences, until she finally lands with a caring couple who show her what a family should be like. But Rumer was born under a curse, and everyone she cares for dies if they’re around her for long. Her mother was the infamous mob assassin Celene Cross, whose body was pulled from the Thames after a job gone wrong. Rumer simply wants to escape the shadow of her mother, so she lives on the streets, stays away from people as much as possible, and does the odd “shadowing” job for a private detective named Julian.

But one day while working a job, she’s caught, thrown into a van, and taken to a warehouse for interrogation. It turns out a mob boss named Mara thinks she has something he wants, a mythical weapon called the Crook Spear. Rumer has no idea what he’s talking about, but it doesn’t take long for her to start putting the pieces together. One thing’s for sure: all the clues lead back to Celene Cross and her horrible past.

As Rumer tries desperately to stay alive, in the midst of several factions who are determined to kill her in order to find the Crook Spear, she’ll cross paths with several key people from her past. Are the rumors about the nature of the Crook Spear true? If so, Rumer knows she has to be the one to find it first, because it might be the key to ending her curse for good.

This story was crazy! I suspect your enjoyment will probably hinge on whether or not you end up liking the main character, Rumer, because she’s a tough character to love. Luckily, I found her to be a refreshing change of pace, and despite the moments when I couldn’t stand the things she did, or the decisions she made, Rumer really grew on me, and by the end of the story I wanted her to find peace and happiness. The story is told in first person present tense, so it had an immediacy about it that fit the pacing. Rumer’s life is in danger from the first page to the last and that pace rarely slows down, and Winning’s tight writing and punchy dialog were key in making the pacing nearly flawless.

I also loved the characters who surround Rumer, both good and bad. Rumer never lets people get too close to her because she knows they’ll eventually end up dead, but there are a handful of characters that are special to her, and I loved those moments when things slow down a bit and we get to know the side of Rumer that she keeps hidden. There’s Troll, a boy from her past  who sees past her anger; her foster parents Frances and George, who give her a safe place to land for the first time in her life; and Bolt, a man who Rumer saved from a burning building. None of the characters in this story lead easy lives, but Winning gives all of them glimpses of happiness at times, although that happiness is always fleeting.

Winning’s story jumps around from past to present, but he gives the reader a road map by labeling his chapters with titles like “Two Years Before the Hammer” or “One Day Before the Hammer”—obviously centering all of Rumer’s most poignant life moments around what happens with the hammer (and you’ll have to read the story to find out what that is!). I thought it was a brilliant structure that gives us intel about Rumer’s past and how she ended up the way she did by slowing revealing these emotion-fraught moments. Non-linear timelines are tough to get right, and Winning did a great job.

As far as negatives go, there were only a couple of small things that distracted me. Rumer’s interior dialogue does get a bit repetitive at times, especially when she’s trying to figure out what the Crook Spear is. There’s also a moment near the end of the book where she’s standing outside smoking a cigarette, and I swear that was the only time in the story that she smokes. Although maybe I just missed the other moments, but it did seem a little jarring to me.

The action at the end gets even more intense as Rumer collides with her past and present in a huge showdown. The story didn’t go where I expected it to, and I certainly didn’t know how things would turn out for Rumer until the last page. This was a thrill ride from start to finish and I look forward to reading more from this talented writer.

Big thanks to the author for supplying a review copy.