Gizmo's Reviews: #Review - Blood Victory by Christopher Rice #Thriller #Suspense

Series: The Burning Girl (#3)
Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Release Date: August 18, 2020
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Source: Publisher
Genre: Thrillers / Suspense

On a cross-country journey to hell, fear is the engine and vengeance is the destination as Christopher Rice’s Amazon Charts bestselling series continues.

As the test subject of an experimental drug, Charlotte Rowe was infused with extraordinary powers. As the secret weapon of a mysterious consortium, she baits evil predators and stops them in their tracks. But it takes more than fear to trigger what’s coursing through Charlotte’s blood. She needs to be terrorized. Serial killer Cyrus Mattingly is up to the task.

Cyrus is a long-haul truck driver, and his cargo bay is a gallery of horrors on wheels. To stop his bloodshed, Charlotte will become his next victim, reining in her powers so she can face each of his evils in turn.

As much as they know about Cyrus—his method of selecting victims, his prolonged rituals—there is something they don’t. What happens on the dark and lonely highways is only the journey. It’s the destination that’s truly depraved. Before she can unleash vengeance on a scale this killer has never seen, Charlotte and her team will have to go the distance into hell.

Blood Victory, by author Christopher Rice, is the third installment in the authors Burning Girl series. In this installment, Charlotte Rowe goes after Cyrus Mattingly and those like him who pick up women who are never heard from again. You can call it human trafficking if you like since the chosen women are taken long distances to a secret place where Mother has set up shop. Charlotte's plan is to lure Cyrus to targeting her by pretending to be someone else, and then hopefully he can lead Charlotte and her team, which includes Cole Graydon, the CEO of Graydon Pharmaceuticals, Noah Turlington, who returns to the series, Luke & Bailey Prescott, to Cyrus' base of operation.

I should probably summarize why you should be reading this series. In the beginning, Charlotte Rowe aka Trina Pierce, spent the first 7 years of her life in the hands of the only parents she knew—a pair of serial killers named Abigail and Daniel Banning who murdered her mother and tried to shape Charlotte in their own twisted image. If only the nightmare had ended when she was rescued. Instead, her real father exploited her tabloid-ready story for fame and profit—until Charlotte finally broke free from her ghoulish past and fled to Arizona where she met Dylan aka Noah. Noah tricked her into taking what she believed was a new drug to calm her anxieties.

Noah injected her with a substance called Zypraxen that gives Charlotte superhuman strength once she is triggered by certain emotions. Charlotte became a person who has preternatural powers and strengths that are wanted by certain nefarious consortium of powerful players. Over the course of this series, she's got herself out of life and death situations that didn't look good for our heroine thanks to Zypraxen. But she's not exactly free. Cole's hoping that he can mass produce the drug so that others who fell to rapists, serial killers, and human traffickers can fight back and take down their abusers. But Charlotte is the only one who has survived. Charlotte has never forgiven Noah for what he did to her.

She did agree to work with Cole hunting down mass murderers, rapists, and killers who have avoided justice. Thankfully, Charlotte found Luke, a Deputy Sheriff in their hometown, who has had his own nightmares since reuniting with Charlotte including being kidnapped thanks to Cole's security failures. Bailey is Luke's brother. Bailey sees a world without walls. He's willing to go wherever he desires which makes him a good person to have around when Charlotte needs back-up. The bad part is that Cole's consortium really would like to see Charlotte in a lab, not running around freely acting as though she's a superhero.

This causes all sorts of consternation with Cole because he wants Charlotte to remain free doing what she's doing. I think that this book is tied down unnecessarily by the ongoing tension between Cole and Noah who were once lovers. I think that the addition of Mother to this story gives the story that dark quality that the writer has added to this story from the beginning. There is another character who is featured in this story. Holly is another woman who became a target of Mother’s operation to shut up strong willed women. Holly’s story ends with her making a choice of what to do with her life now that Charley saved her from certain death.

Charley has her own demons that chase her. She still remembers finding her mother’s last words on the place where she was kept. She's not indestructible. She's still human no matter how much others want her to believe otherwise. Her trials in the first part of this book are dark and twisted and it really allows you to see that Charley's past still weighs heavily on what she does now. She still remembers her own fathers’ betrayal at trying to make an easy buck of her horrible story. But, with Luke alongside, she has found a bit of light that hopefully won't be extinguished any time soon.

Those like Cyrus and his brothers are not fictional characters in the real world. Human and sex trafficking is real and is now being addressed by US Marshal's and other agencies as they attempt to bring missing children home. They've had remarkable success in several states recently. An estimated 1.2 million kids are affected by trafficking every single year. 2 million children are subjected to prostitution in the global commercial sex trade. If you know of anyone who might be missing or involved, please contact the