New Release Review! A TORCH IN HIS HEART by Anna Belfrage (The Wanderer #1)

In the long lost ancient past, two men fought over the girl with eyes like the Bosporus under a summer sky. It ended badly. She died. They died. 

Since then, they have all tumbled through time, reborn over and over again. Now they are all here, in the same place, the same time and what began so long ago must finally come to an end. 

Ask Helle Madsen what she thinks about reincarnation and she’ll laugh in your face. Besides, Helle has other stuff to handle, what with her new, exciting job in London and her drop-dead but seriously sinister boss, Sam Woolf. And then one day Jason Morris walks into her life and despite never having clapped eyes on him before, she recognises him immediately. Very weird. Even more weird is the fact that Sam and Jason clearly hate each other’s guts. Helle’s life is about to become extremely complicated and far too exciting. 

ADULT CONTENT: This book contains explicit sex scenes 

Purchase Links:

Amazon | Books-A-Million | Barnes & Noble

Review:

A Torch in His Heart is a dark romance in which three people live and re-live the lives they started 3000 years ago, each trying to finally get it right this time. Do they? We don’t know for sure, because this one is very much a to be continued…

The two male characters–Jason and Sam/Samion–have a leg up on Helle, because each life that they live they know more about the past ones they’ve led than she does. Samion, according to Jason, is born knowing what has already happened and is aware of what his goals are and why. Jason always finds out somewhere around his pre-teen years, but Helle, whose POV this story is told in here, has only vague dreams and uneasy feelings about things unless one of the others (this time it’s Jason, it’s not really clear when or if this particular situation has happened before since their original time around, with all three of them coming into cotact) clues her in about things–which of course, like any normal person, she has trouble believing. 

So the reader here is a lot like Helle–a bit behind Jason and Samion, and trying to figure out what is going on, what happened three millennia ago, and how the two are related–and much of the book is taken up with explanations and flashbacks. Samion is very much the bad guy, though, then and now, so in between her “Wait, what???” moments Helle is often running for her life, literally or figuratively. And then just as everything really starts to come together, we’re left with a cliffhanger-ish ending. Book 2 is out already (Smoke in her Eyes ), but book 3 isn’t yet, so be warned… 

Rating: 3 stars / C+

I voluntarily reviewed an Advance Reader Copy of this book.

About the author:

Anna was raised abroad, on a pungent mix of Latin American culture, English history and Swedish traditions. As a result she’s multilingual and most of her reading is historical- both non-fiction and fiction. Possessed of a lively imagination, she has drawers full of potential stories, all of them set in the past. She was always going to be a writer – or a historian, preferably both. Ideally, Anna aspired to becoming a pioneer time traveller, but science has as yet not advanced to the point of making that possible. Instead she ended up with a degree in Business and Finance, with very little time to spare for her most favourite pursuit. Still, one does as one must, and in between juggling a challenging career Anna raised her four children on a potent combination of invented stories, historical debates and masses of good food and homemade cakes. They seem to thrive…

For years she combined a challenging career with four children and the odd snatched moment of writing. Nowadays Anna spends most of her spare time at her writing desk. The children are half grown, the house is at times eerily silent and she slips away into her imaginary world, with her imaginary characters. Every now and then the one and only man in her life pops his head in to ensure she’s still there.

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