Loyalty: The brand new novel from the bestselling author

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Also, in this book there is an extract from her future book and she clearly writes the word "noice" instead of "noise." Grammar and spelling mistakes in this book made it completely unreadable.

The Family by Martina Cole | Goodreads The Family by Martina Cole | Goodreads

I have read many gangland books inc all of the authors previous but got to say this for me was probably the grittiest, hard hitting and genuinely brutal one yet I am convinced that the author assumes all of her readers are idiots. She described her characters an infuriating number of times. By chapter 10, you've already got the idea that Phil is a good-looking, but soul-less and cruel bastard. Instead of just leaving you with a few descriptions here and there of him, adding details to his character every now and then, she describes him in pretty much the same language every other chapter. People don't want to be told he's a complete jerk by every other character in the book, they want to see it in action! She did this for every character. It was horrible. Betrayal is purely and simply the everyday story of criminal folk, from 1981 until 2016. They are a large East End family, headed by Reeva, a fiery Irishwoman, who has five sons and one daughter, all by different fathers, and all of mixed blood.I've seen a few complaints on foul language, but if you don't like that in a book, then these sort of books should not be what you are reading. And yes, I am aware it’s a gangster novel, so the characters don’t have to be nice. But the characters I’m expected to root for just have no reason for me to care for them besides the fact that I’m reading this story from their perspective. BETRAYAL is the second book of Martina’s I have read (I read THE TAKE early last year) and I cannot wait to devour more of her titles. There’s something about the raw, grittiness of the worlds she creates that pulls you in and pops you right in the middle of it.

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If you like Martina Cole and have been waiting for this book you will love it but take a breath every once in a while as it is hard going in places with the realism Almost every woman in this book is treated awfully, and our “heroes” consist of a psychopathic cradle-snatcher, a domestic abuser, and a womaniser who treats attachment as a fatal flaw. All these heroes are incredibly hypocritical towards their partners and the people around them, and never get called out for it. Martina has the skill of creating characters that drive you crazy. Love and hate are so close in emotion and I felt this a lot with Aidan. I loved the way he fought from a young age to provide for his family as essentially the man of the house, to make a name for himself and ensure that his family was taken care of. What I didn’t like were how the power slowly starts to corrupt him and with that comes unsavoury behaviour towards both his girlfriend and his family. Character development. Rather than showing how and why her characters change, she just suddenly has them as different people. Now, I realize that she jumps forward in time four times in the book. That does not excuse her from not explaining why Breda suddenly loves her brother more than she loves her own son, especially when she said an irritating number of times previously that her son was the most important person to her and that he "meant the world" to her. She also had this infuriating habit of spending a chapter or two on a character and making that character seem important and then completely dropping said character from the plot never to return with nary an explanation to placate the reader. She lost her most interesting characters this way.

Of course because the chapters are so short, you're not to expect much in terms of content, and the impact of key events in the novel is often lost. Nevertheless, the characters and the story are what hook the reader, and see them through to what is a very interesting and effective ending, the author achieving the desired crescendo in an otherwise slow paced story. It was definitely better than the last few MC books I have read. But I am still finding the books quite repetitive. The best way to describe it is this story felt very cookie-cutted. The story, the characters, the situations, they were all cookie-cutted. All very tried and tested. While I don't think that this is a bad thing in some books and series, it felt out of place here. And for an author like Martina Cole to use this formula is off.