Book Review – If I Were You (Inside Out Trilogy #1) by Lisa Renee Jones

• Buy IF I WERE YOU  (Kindle)  – full reading order below

*** Note: This book is now part of a completed series. At the time I read it, this book (the first of the series) was the only available book and so my frustration that you’ll see in the review is due to the fact that it was a great book, with a ton of mystery but it left me hanging with a lot of unanswered questions and the other books weren’t available. 

If you were to read it now though, you’ll be able to just read straight though to the rest of the series 🙂

_________________________

NONE OF MY QUESTIONS WERE ANSWERED!!!! 

and I literally mean none  of them *lip quiver*

I feel a little cheated… I mean, it was a really good book – it totally hooked me into the story, made me care about the characters, got me all hot and bothered, and filled my mind with approximately 4 hundred bajillion questions and theories and then…  left me hanging!!! 

O_O

I don’t really know what to say. I feel like I know about as much now as I did at the beginning of the book 😐

“People arent always what they seem… The art does not always mimic the artist. You never know the real person until you slide beneath their surface.”

The story follows Sara, a high school teacher whose passion in life is art and ends up getting possession of a storage locker that belongs to a mystery woman named Rebecca, whose journals Sara finds and reads. The journals are erotic and mysterious telling the story of Rebecca’s spiral into a relationship with a dangerously sexy and controlling Dom.

The story is addictive – draws you RIGHT in. Its a deliciously thrilling and dangerously erotic mystery with a dual storyline going on between the current day life of Sara and the life of Rebecca as read in her journals.

These are the beginning lines of the book:

“Dangerous.
For months I’ve had dreams and nightmares about how perfectly he personifies the word. Sleep-laden, alternate realities where I can vividly smell hi musky male scent, feel his hard body against mine. Taste the sweet and sensuous flavor of him — like milk chocolate with its silky demands that I indulge in one more bite. And another. So good I’d forgotten there’s a price for overindulgence. And there is a price…. It started out as any other erotic adventure with him. Unpredictable. Exciting. I barely remember how it all went wrong. How it took such a dark turn. 

See what I mean? You kinda just need to know more!

The more Sara discovers about Rebecca, the deeper and darker the mystery gets. New journal entries lead to more questions which in turn lead to a plethora of possibilities.

Since the last journal entry was rather ominous, Sara decides to try and find Rebecca, but, having no idea where to start, she goes to the art gallery where Rebecca worked as a starting point. There she meets the gallery manager, Mark Compton, who is sophisticated, powerful, controlling, arrogant, and alluringly sexy who offers her Rebecca’s job while she is ‘away’. On the same day, Sara also meets one of the famous artists whose work is displayed at the gallery, Chris Merit – he’s a rebel, tattooed, doesn’t play by the rules, gorgeous, raw, mysterious and with a dark side that he keeps trying to warn her away from. Drawn to him and intrigued by the gallery manager, Sara slips deeper and deeper into Rebecca’s world. And the more she is drawn into the mystery of unraveling Rebecca’s life, the more her own life starts to entwine with hers.

This book was HOT – those journal entries were scorching!! I can see how some people have compared it to Fifty Shades. I wouldn’t compare it personally, but it definitely had Fifty-ish vibes in certain places but the story stands completely alone. The relationship that Rebecca talks about in the journals is a BDSM one with some mystery guy. We can suspect who he is, but honestly the evidence could point in any number of directions so we don’t really know.

And the heroine made some choices and decisions along the way that I didn’t fully see as being understandable, so that did disconnect me here and there from the story a little, but I just tried to be understanding and so it wasn’t a huge deal but I still did go ‘hmmmm’ a few times…

I totally loved the hero (or, rather, one of them? again, I’m not really sure). He had that delicious flawed aspect with just the right amount of mystery to him to make me love him and yet wonder about him.

“Be warned, Sara. I’m no saint. If I take you upstairs, I’m going to strip you naked and fuck you the way I’ve wanted to since the moment we first met.”

The ending is a HUGE cliffhanger. Literally the story just stops at an “omg” moment… I will say that I’ve never been fond of cliffhangers and I think I would have been more fine with this one had I had a few more questions answered (or any for that matter). Either way *sigh* yes, I will totally be going on to book 2…. I NEED TO KNOW WHAT HAPPENS!!!!!!

I have a feeling that when I finish reading all the books in the series, these may end up on my favorites list, but for now, I’m just a frustrated mess…

*runs off to find herself a guaranteed HEA book*

Rating: 4 stars. First book of a series.

CASTING:

• There are just so many characters to cast in this that I’ll just leave you with this shot… I think it compliments the book quite perfectly –> Click here

___________________________________________

** COMPLETE SERIES READING ORDER **

All the books are out now! Click the cover to purchase 🙂