Deacon by CJ Warrant
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This one is a powerful book that makes you come to terms with what the characters experience in your own life. It definitely brought tears to my eyes at multiple points in the book and yet I couldn’t stop reading. I just needed to know what happened next.

Deacon who left his home town and never looked back to pursue his career in racing returns home battered and a little more broken than when he left. He returns to attend his best friend’s funeral and figure out just what to do with his life and that of his mother who has been diagnosed with alzheimers. As if that is not enough on his plate he runs into the one person who turned him inside out in the past and left a bitter, angry taste in his mouth, Olivia. Meanwhile, Olivia has found herself a new life after the heartbreak of the past. She is a nurse in Nashville, with a pediatric doctor as her boyfriend, all the pieces seem to be falling in line for her. That is until a trip home for a friend’s funeral makes her confront the one person who broke her heart and left without a word. The longer Deacon and Olivia spend in their home town of Alama the more problems come their way. With so many trials and tribulations will they ever find their happily ever after? Can the past really be forgiven or is there too much water under the bridge to move past?

There was a lot of action packed into this book and plenty of cliff hangers. Most of which were answered in the end but there are several openings for the author to close in books about the other characters. There are also highly difficult topics confronted in this book like physical assault, sexual assault, and dealing with a loved one that has alzheimers. Most people have faced these topics as they happened to them or someone they loved and the author does a great job with showing care in how they are presented while remaining true to the characters’ experience. This was a fantastic novel and I will wait with bated breath to see about following future release dates from this author in this series. After all, I would like to close the rest of the cliffhangers left open in this book!

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