TOtimes Books: MINE by Rachael Tamayo

Mine by Rachael Tamayo – Justin Gray, a divorcee and successful businessman from Texas, wakes up in his Las Vegas hotel room following an alcohol-fuelled weekend in Sin City with his brother David.

However, he is not alone.

When Justin wakes up, he finds a naked, voluptuous blonde in her 20s named Britney sleeping beside him in the bed. He doesn’t remember the encounter with her during his Vegas binge of alcohol, gambling and sex, but Britney does. That comes in the form of a wedding ring that she is wearing, officially making her Mrs. Justin Gray. Justin wants to forget this “mistake”, get a quick annulment and return home to Texas in peace; however, Britney does not easily let go of the fact that she is married to him, and follows him home, much to the surprise of David, and to the consternation of his ex-wife Jennifer and their daughter Abby.

But thanks to this brief encounter in Vegas, Justin gets unexpectedly caught up in a web woven with deceit, greed, anger, ulterior motives, dark family secrets, a trust fund and murder.

Is this something out of the movie “The Hangover” taken to an extreme? No. It’s the scenario of the captivating thriller Mine by Rachael Tamayo, as part of her Deadly Sins series of novels.

The story is told from the points-of-view of its four main protagonists, who are Justin, Jennifer, Abby and of course, Britney (as well as her alter ego Madison). These distinct points-of-view are not presented as separate parts of the narrative, but literally scattered across it when their pertinent contributions to the story become relevant to the plot development, which is one of the reasons why Mine works so well to grip the reader from the start. As well, there are many surprising plot twists in the book, but Tamayo presents them in a neat fashion, so as to not confuse the reader in a fog of complications that would have been detrimental towards the quest of reaching to the book’s logical conclusions, and how and why it ended up the way it did.

Mine reads like a prime time TV soap a la Dallas and Dynasty gone so wrong, yet it never fails to entertain the reader. And if her next books in this series echo such an approach as Mine, it can make the Deadly Sins even more entertaining to read about.

Other articles from totimes.ca – otttimes.ca – mtltimes.ca