Honey Trapped
J.A. Price gets real from the Bronx!
Honey trapped is right. This one absolutely flows like honey. The characters are as rich and saccharine (when they’re not spicy) as the taste of honey. Pria and Drew would not be out of place in an MTV ‘80s video. I can almost hear the song “Pour Some Sugar On Me” playing in the background as I progress through the plot with nail-biting attention. Drew is an alpha male who pursues Pria with calculated machismo. Right off the bat, we see him doing his homework, and it’s disturbing, to say the least. I watch with bated breath as he moves in for the introduction, appealing first to her tender heart while she does volunteer work at the Humane Society. He charms her, he charms her friend, he charms the dog she’s working with. It’s so easy. Too easy. He’s too perfect. Or is he? Drew carefully honey traps not only Pria but everyone she knows—her nearest and dearest—until everyone, including her protective, walking stereotype of a brother named Sal, is practically begging him to make a move. What does Pria want? That’s obvious. She wants him, and she wants him badly, and he plays her lust like a fiddle. It’s both sexy and nerve-racking, and I can’t figure out if this is a romance or a Gothic horror. Drew does seem to genuinely like Pria, and she’s obviously head over heels into him, but as a reader, I can’t help being suspicious of his motives. It is clear, too, that this was the author’s intention. J.A. Price does a great job of hooking the reader with subtle hints of Drew’s duplicity, and yet he is complex enough to leave me in doubt of my suspicions. It’s tempting to psychoanalyze both of them. We learn that Drew was raised by a single mom; maybe Pria’s tight-knit extended Italian-American family is the root of his attraction to her. In a curious way, he seems almost more into Sal than Pria. The plot is a “slow burn,” notes one captivated reader who reviewed it on the Kindle Vella site. Like a candle in the wind, or the sticky, slow drip of honey.
Episodes 1, 2, 3: Five Stars! (I will be buying the tokens to continue reading this one!)
Honey Trapped, by J.A. Price: https://www.amazon.com/kindle-vella/story/B0BKWVKN3B
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