The Secret One
You should know from the start of this review that this is my first Corisi Billionaires book. The fact that I didn’t enjoy it is heavily wrapped up in being new to the series, because the book spends an enormous amount of page count on people I didn’t know and overarching plots I wasn’t invested in. If the twenty percent of the page count which focused on the main couple had been a separate novella, I would probably have given it a B, but as it was, The Secret One was a slog I do not recommend to anybody not invested in the first two books.
Christof Romero first met McKenna Decker in a bar, and some of his comments helped put her on a path to secure her dream of running a racing park. Years later, she stops to help a motorist stranded at the roadside with car trouble, and it’s Chris. The two of them re-establish their relationship. Secrets in Chris’s family are coming out, and as the even-tempered one, Chris is the man to solve them – but with the help of McKenna posing as his fake fiancée.
As you can tell, there’s not a lot of tension between McKenna and Chris. Chris is, frankly, wonderful – he admires McKenna’s business success and wants to support her. He’s a supportive, helpful listener, and single-handedly keeps this book out of the D range. My only concern about him is why Christof is considered an Italian name. Anyway, the only way to force tension into Chris and McKenna’s relationship is to give McKenna a deep-seated mistrust of men, which unfortunately the author fails to justify with more than vague ‘I dated some losers’ backstory.
The rest of the book is spent on Chris’s family drama. I’m afraid to even explain much of it because it could be a spoiler, but basically there are secrets all over this family which connects them to protagonists of previous books, and for some reason, a European dowager queen (?) is engaged as an intermediary (??) to force people to address the issues. All villains are neutered by the end, which is dull. Most problematic? People keeping secrets about other people, with the vague rationale that they (whoever the secret is about) don’t ‘seem ready’ to hear it.
Series readers may get closure from this book. Personally, I just wanted to keep it closed.
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Recent Comments
I loved this one, but I’m absolutely a fan of the series so I can see where and why jumping in mid-stream wouldn’t do it for you.
Cardello’s heroes are always great – they’re Normal Dudes, just like her heroines are Normal People as well.
Normal normal dudes or normal billionaire dudes?
The “billionaire” element plays a rather minor role. The parents had a small Mom & Pop grocery store when their sons (the heroes of the three books) were young. That business grew into a very large enterprise. The family has money, but they don’t live amidst lavish trappings and the heroes don’t act like “traditional” romance novel billionaires. I can’t prove it, but my guess is that Cardello was contracted to provide a certain number of “billionaire romances” and, as that type of hero has become a little less palatable in Romancelandia, she has muted the traits generally associated with billionaire heroes.
^ Yep, no alpha BS.
It’s also possible that her publisher or editor suggested the heroes be switched into billionairehood when they were your average family of small town types.
The billionaire in this book who is apparently a recurring character is ABSOLUTELY alpha BS. Maybe he wasn’t like that in his book but it was interesting to see him in the antagonist role and think dang, alpha billionaire is actually a terrifying person.
Whelp, different opinions!
I liked it a lot more than you did, but I had read the previous two books (THE BROKEN ONE and THE WILD ONE) and I was invested in the backstory of the long-lost relative. I can understand the grade you assigned and your “meh” response if this is your first Cardello book. I really do think THE SECRET ONE only works if you’ve read the previous two books: the romance (which I also liked more than you did) is only part of the book—the previous books provide context for the overarching backstory. In a way, Cardello reminds me of writers like Melanie Harlow and Julianna Stone: consistently producing reliably good books with plenty of heat and heart but never quite breaking through to the top tier.
I listened to and reviewed the audiobook version of the first book and found it pretty ‘meh’ even though it had excellent narrators. I said to Caroline when she submitted this review that I had a real problem then, because that the book (I think it’s The Broken One) opens with a scene that makes absolutely NO SENSE unless you’ve read another series by the author – which wasn’t made clear in the blurb and which I had no idea about until I’d finished listening and reviewing and then went and read some other reviews. It’s misleading to call it a “new” series, and had I known that, I might not have chosen to listen to it. That said, when I got to the main storyline, I wasn’t wild about it either. It was a C or C+ for me, I think.
Which series?
I read the Broken One based on a rave review here, enjoyed the main romance (not raving, but good) and was lost as to the backstory.
I put it down to me not paying enough attention, or next books in series explaining better, and left it at that.
I am not super invested, but I do regret a little that you tell me now – and it was not mentioned in the raving review then – that I am jumping in in the middle of a longer story arc.
are those previous stories any good?
are they wrapped up in this book, or will they go on?
thx!
At the beginning of THE BROKEN ONE, a young girl is trying to piece together her family tree for a school project and wants to know about her father’s family—since there seems to be a lot missing. That little set piece appears totally disconnected from the rest of THE BROKEN ONE (although the girl and her family pop up again throughout the book). How this family—the Corisis—is connected to the Romanos continues to be expanded upon in THE WILD ONE and finally in THE SECRET ONE it’s really almost half of the book. I enjoyed the way Cardello wove the stories of the two families together, but ymmv.