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Across State Lines by Lauren Biel
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Chaos.
Control.
In a broken mind, it’s all merely an illusion.
Kane
I’m an interstate trucker who’s left hundreds of bodies behind him. She’s a woman who’s running from her past. When she gets in my truck, she unwittingly becomes my next victim.
I test her will to live, but the personalities behind mine have a different plan for her. They work to dismantle the fragile equilibrium I’ve struggled to maintain.
As I unravel around her, consumed by conflicting desires, I start to question everything I’ve ever known. Or never known.
Can I let her into the darkness that has consumed me, or will she become yet another tragic casualty of my damaged psyche?
Tropes:
Age Gap
Enemies to lovers
Hate to love
MMC with multiple personalities
Primal
One BedAcross State Lines
Interesting split personality storyline!
The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💚🖤
Heat/Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙
World building: 🌏🌍🌎
Character development: ☺️😊😁
Narrator(s): 🎙🎙🎙🎙🎙
Narration type: Dual Narration
The heroine: Aurora – she was born in New York and attended college in California. Her parents think she graduated, but she dropped out and things went downhill from there. She is now trying to make her way across country, stopping in truck stops to turn tricks to make enough money to get further.
The Hero: Kane (a.k.a. Jax and Tobin) – Kane experienced abuse and trauma from an early age and he subsequently got dissociative identity disorder. His mind created alternate personalities to protect itself from breaking completely. Kane is a long-haul truck driver and a prolific interstate serial killer; he has left bodies all along the interstate 90. Jax is a sweet, gentle soul who is a caretaker, Tobin is a “hyper sexualized consciousness born of sexual trauma” but sees himself as the protector of the other identities. There are others but these are the ones that come out the most.
The story: Like the prior books in this series, this one centers around hitchhiking, which is how Aurora ends up in Kane’s truck. He regularly picks up prostitutes and kills many of them. In this story, Kane and his alters recognize like minds in Aurora. He sees that she is as damaged as he is, just in a separate way. Kane is a really bad guy, he doesn’t like to be touched, and the only time he touches women is when he is strangling them.
Kane grew up with the nameless, a group of brothers he owes money to for buying his awesome truck. He pays them off by selling them women now and then. He actually knows their names but calls them the nameless because he wants to keep them at a distance, and he doesn’t want to know more than he already knows about their business. After Tobin decides he wants Aurora, Kane takes over and picks her up. He decides to sell her to the nameless to help pay off his debt.
I really liked every book in this series that I have listened to so far. They all have been somewhat twisted but have kept my attention. The anti-Heroes are morally grey (very dark grey) but are likable in their own ways. This book was especially interesting because of the DID. It is almost like a reverse harem, since each identity is like a completely different person and Aurora has her own relationships with each of them.
Though I didn’t like how much animosity the two main characters had for each other after they first met. I didn’t see how this would end up being a romance. Both Tobin and Kane just treated her like a dirty prostitute, and she was trying to escape from him, expecting him to kill her if she wasn’t able to get away. Then he starts degrading her and not in a sexual way. I didn’t like that at all. There were a lot of triggers in this book so beware! I have seen this happen before in series like these with morally grey characters. It seems like the authors try to outdo each book in the series with anti-Heroes that get worse and worse as the series progresses. This was that book for me, I have listened to the first two books in this series and really liked them, but this one goes a bit too far for my tastes.
This audiobook was told in two points of view via duet narration and was narrated Teddy Hamilton and Michelle Sparks. Teddy Hamilton has a great voice and always does a stellar job. Whether the character is a billionaire businessman or a blue-collar serial killer, he just has a voice that is believable no matter what. Michelle Sparks has a nice voice and also does a terrific job in this one. I love that this series is done in duet narration, it makes the audiobooks so much better.
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