My Rating:

Favorite Quotes:

With his horn-rimmed glasses, drab gray suit, and his leather satchel thrown over his shoulder, he had to be the nerdiest-looking Black man she’d ever seen in her life. Well, that wasn’t true. He was maybe a distant second to Steve Urkel. He had absolutely no swag and stood out like a sore thumb among all the other men in the room, making her laugh to herself.

“Mama, why do you insist on talking about regular people like they’re peasants?” “Because they are, as far as I’m concerned.” The older woman shoved her sunglasses back up the bridge of her button nose. “I didn’t marry three wealthy husbands because I was enamored with being ‘regular,’ sweetheart. I put up with a lot of bullshit so I wouldn’t have to be that anymore.”

She wondered why she hadn’t spotted the resemblance before. Maybe it was because their temperaments were so different. Whereas Darius came off cool and calm as a soothing creek in the forest, Tariq was a sleeping volcano, with bubbling magma just beneath the surface, ready to explode when you least expected it. Unfortunately for Darius, a creek couldn’t quell a volcano, no matter how hard he tried.

Tariq was a hustler. A survivor. A chameleon. Darius swore Tariq had nine lives— unfortunately, he suspected all those lives would be lonely ones.

My Review:

The conclusion to the saga was quite a riveting tale and had a rather bittersweet ending for my favorite characters, although some finally got what was due them. The entire cast of disagreeable and questionable characters from book one carried over with a few new additions added into the mix. The intriguing storylines were active, taut with tension, and well-honed with sharp imagery, bad decisions, and impending peril. The writing was emotive and on point, while peppered with liberal use of the “n-word” which I found rather unsettling as I have been conditioned to find any use of the pejorative quite jarring and oddly far more egregious than profanity.