Book Review: Marriage Games

Marriage Games (The Games Duet #1)
C.D. Reiss

Release Date: October 22, 2016

Book Description:
THIRTY DAYS
That’s all Adam Steinbeck demands of his wife.
Thirty days in a remote cottage, doing everything he demands. After that, he’ll sign her divorce papers and give her complete ownership of their company.

THIRTY DAYS
That’s how long he has to rediscover the man he once was. The Dominant Master he hid when he fell in love with her five years ago.

THIRTY DAYS
She wants the business they built badly enough to go to the cottage for a month. Cut off ties to the world and do his bidding. She can submit to him with her body, but her heart will never yield.

She thinks this is his pathetic attempt to repair their marriage.

She’s wrong.

Amazon US | Goodreads

Review:
Gah! I don't know what to say about this book. I loved it and hated it at the same time. C.D. Reiss always writes such complex, multi-layered characters and stories - you think you know where it is going but really, you have no idea... 

"The world we inhabited wasn’t designed for people to be in love. It was designed for intensity, pain, pleasure, courtesy, and ritual." Marriage Games (Kindle Location 584).

This book will mess with your head. It brings up feelings... so, so many feelings. Adam and Diana are enigmatic. There is love between them, but this is not a lighthearted romance with a convenient HEA for dessert. This book takes on a Herculean task of dissecting a marriage, bound and ruined by the protective lies and boundaries these two have set themselves. It's devastating in its brutal honesty, forbidding in its denial, and full of discovery - perhaps too late found to salvage anything worthwhile... Time will tell (or rather the next installment -- Separation Games will be out January 2017).

Recommended with reservations: explicit but consensual content and situations

The Games Duet Series:
Separation Games
Expected Publication: January 11, 2017