Featured Author Review: The Saint by Tiffany Reisz

by Tee Tate
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The Saint: (The Original Sinners: White Years #1)
Tiffany Reisz
Harlequin MIRA

In the beginning, there was him.

Gutsy, green-eyed Eleanor never met a rule she didn’t want to break. She’s sick of her mother’s zealotry and the confines of Catholic school, and declares she’ll never go to church again. But her first glimpse of beautiful, magnetic Father Marcus Stearns and his lust-worthy Italian motorcycle is an epiphany. Suddenly, daily Mass seems like a reward, and her punishment is the ache she feels when they’re apart. He is intelligent and insightful and he seems to know her intimately at her very core. Eleanor is consumed—and even she knows that can’t be right.

But when one desperate mistake nearly costs Eleanor everything, it is Søren who steps in to save her. She vows to repay him with complete obedience…and a whole world opens before her as he reveals to her his deepest secrets.

Danger can be managed—pain, welcomed. Everything is about to begin.

Every choice has a price. Sometimes we don’t know what it is until after we’ve paid it.

Father Marcus Stearns is an enigma. Part father to the fatherless, part wounded child, this character molds and shapes everything that protagonist Eleanor will become. He is a patient man, willing to sacrifice his personal desires if it serves to fashion stability and loyalty in the young rebellious fifteen year who begins to orbit his universe.

But the good father, or Søren has he is known in more intimate circles, doesn’t only require Eleanor’s submission. He wants her patient. He wants her obedient and Søren is not a man often refused.

The Saint is Reisz introduction to the past of the characters readers came to love in her Original Sinners series. This is the story of how Eleanor, the impressionable, but passionate high school student became Nora, the erotic novelist/dominate and the man who guided her along the way.

The events that lead Eleanor and Søren to their present detailed in the first Original Sinners novel, The Siren, are detailed here in vivid and painstaking detail. We learn of Eleanor’s neglectful father, her overzealous, perpetually remorseful mother and the inclinations the young girl harbors–inclinations that Father Stearns notices his first day in the new parish.

Søren sees in Elanor a kindred spirit; the echo of the kid he’d once been and perhaps that is part of the attraction–that these characters are so intrinsically connected by the isolation they have experienced and the desires to connect, to learn, to teach.

Once again Reisz uses the written word as her medium, painting with every syllable, every well-constructed sentence a lyrical story of loss and laughter, of pleasure and pain.

There is mystery. There is, of course, that enigmatic past unraveling with every chapter and it is documented so expertly by Reisz that the reader feels helpless to pull their attention from the page.

The Saint is a brilliant conclusion to the story readers have already loved and an engaging beginning to another chronicle in Nora and Søren’s story.

Highly recommended.

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