#BlogTour ‘Reckless’ by R.J McBrien

About the book…

You think you’ll stay the same – you won’t. Infidelity will change you forever. There can be no going back.

Kirsten Calloway knows she should be grateful. She has a stable marriage, decent job, and a wonderful teenage daughter. But she also has a raging libido that won’t shut up, and a husband who’d rather go on a bike ride.

She bumps into an old friend at a school reunion who faces a similar problem. Dianne, though, has found the answer: a discreet agency which arranges casual sex for people just like them, people who want to keep their marriages but also scratch that itch.

Enter Zac: younger, handsome and everything Kirsten could hope for in bed. For a while, they seem to have it all. Kirsten even finds herself becoming a better wife and mother. But Zac wants more – a lot more, and he’ll stop at nothing to get it.

Sexually charged, shocking and relatable, Reckless is a profound exploration of marriage, motherhood and desire.

Massive thanks to Sophie at Midas PR for inviting me to read and review the first novel by RJ McBrien, ‘Reckless’, which is published by Welbeck on July 22nd!

This book really surprised me, I came back to write the review after finishing and would have sworn that RJ McBrien was a woman-the main protagonist, Kirsten, is such a truthful and authentic female voice that I was very close to punching the air quite a few times during my read. Check this out, it happens when Kirsten mistakenly thinks she has been wolf whistled at and turns to berate the construction worker, only to find he is ogling the young woman behind her –

”One of the perks of reaching a certain age :not having to put up with that crap any more. Hit your forties,and you become invisible.These days I could walk in public without every man sliding his eyes all over me.Which had to be a plus, didn’t it?”

As a woman in my mid forties I felt her rage, her emotions always on the boil, her reduction as a by stander in her own life now that her eminently sensible husband no longer saw her a sex object, neither does her daughter need her to keep boundaries for her. As her daughter, Jess, is becoming a sexual being, Kirsten wants to tighten the reins and it is this disconnect between being a mother and a woman and a wife which causes her anguish.

Does it lead to her being complacent and, indeed, reckless?

Or is she aiming for visibility in a world which passes her by now that her biological function has been fulfilled?

This is a stunningly woven and intricate plot which could have gone awry and played the whole ‘woman know your place!’ trope for all that it was worth.

Instead, Kirsten attends(albeit reluctantly) a school reunion where she hopes to reconnect with a boy she used to go to school with, Khanda, and it leads to a place of deception, wantonness, seduction and empowerment….and murder.

The story zips back and forth to establish a timeline where Kirsten has become this woman who is unsatisfied, on multiple levels, and realises that she may have settled for the safest options in her life rather than fight for an alternative. Interspersed with this are police reports about the discovery of an unidentified man’s body at the side of a railroad track, one who lands Kirsten squarely in the frame for having committed this crime.

Whether she has, or not, the reader is given time to get to know her and her frame of mind, her background, and to draw a conclusion of sorts about her relative innocence or guilt. The two stories dovetail together beautifully as this novel transcends thriller, or dark romance, or genre classification-it is, essentially, about a woman who wants to, and needs to be, out of control for the first time in her life.

Or is she, in fact, more in control than ever?

I absolutely devoured this delicious slice of noir whole with a dessert of extreme satisfaction. Highly recommended, this is a writer to watch out for, I have a feeling he is going places…

About the author…

After spinning out his university career as long as possible, (York, Sorbonne, SUNY, Yale and a stint teaching at Beijing University), RJ McBrien returned to London to try and make it as a writer. Like many people, he owes his TV break to The Bill. He progressed to working on other people’s shows (Red Caps, Soldier Solider, Merlin, Atlantis, Wallander, Spooks and Britannia) as well as writing original pieces (Trust for ITV and The Debt for the BBC). After a brief foray into Hollywood script doctoring, he enrolled on the Faber Novel Writing course in 2018 and Reckless, his first novel, is the result.

Twitter @welbeckpublish @midaspr