Choose Me - Book Review

By Heidi McLaughlin

Synopsis

Two brothers.
One woman.
One son.
One choice.

Lives ripped apart, shattered and rebuilt.

Evan and Nate Archer: Brothers, best friends, warriors and now enemies. Both in love with the same woman. Both determined to fight for what they want.

Nate Archer promised to protect Ryley Clarke in the event Evan didn’t make it back. It’s a promise between brothers since the early days of basic training. Nate never considered that his feelings, long buried since high school, would resurface and grow stronger.

Evan Archer wants answers. He wants someone to pay. After being gone for an unprecedented amount of time, nothing is making sense now that he’s home. Most of all, he can’t understand how his brother ended up engaged to his fiancée. Evan is determined to uncover the mystery, and win back his family.

The Archers are about to fight dirty.

Review

Nate has returned home from a training exercise to find his long-deceased twin is alive and well and has been living in his house with his family. To say that Evan is angry at Nate’s “betrayal” would be a huge understatement and he vows to do whatever it takes to get Ryley and his son back. As the brothers come to blows, Ryley is stuck in the middle with her son knowing that she’ll only be able to choose one of them while destroying the other in the process. But questions about Evan’s six year deployment remain and lives are threatened the deeper they dig.

I was really looking forward to reading CHOOSE ME and getting to experience the gut-wrenching sadness when finding out who Ryley would choose, leaving the other a devastated mess. What’s really disappointing for me is that as soon as a fourth person entered the picture, one of the brother’s intense love for Ryley suddenly vanished into thin air, so a choice didn’t even have to be made. I mean, I suppose it was nice and all that neither brother was left alone, but talk about being let down.

While some of the story is focused on the Archer brothers and Ryley, most of the book revolves around the conspiracy involving Evan’s team and their six year deployment. Again, I was looking forward to the conspiracy unravelling, finding out who the players involved were, the hows, the whys, all of it, but sadly even the conspiracy let me down. I read this book in one sitting and unless I accidentally skipped a bunch of sections, I don’t understand how the conspiracy was solved. We were only provided with little bits of information and somehow with those tiny pieces, the entire operation was brought to its knees. It was all wrapped up and most of the parties involved got arrested, but I was left with way too many questions (which are bugging the hell out of me) because nothing was really explained. The conspiracy was my favourite part of the story in book # 1, but its execution and conclusion was a huge disappointment.

CHOOSE ME is told in Nate and Evan’s POVs with the epilogue being told in Ryley’s. There will be another novel in the Archer Brothers series and it will be about Evan’s teammate, Tucker McCoy, as he tries to locate his wife and daughter that went missing after he was declared dead.