A Touch of Malice: Hades & Persephone, Book 3

Editing...it’s not a new concept. If there weren’t so many grammatical errors, I would have rated this book with 2.5 or 3 stars.

I really enjoyed the first two books in this series. I even read the first in the Hades POV and enjoyed it. This book however did not deliver. It was hard to read because it just didn’t hold together. There was little to no character development. Hades and Sephy’s love story seems to continue the same as always: see each other get it on, midunderstanding push away, little to no communication and maybe way more sex scenes than necessary and I’m normally all for those. The sex scenes just seemed like they came every other page and never led to anything. Also Sephy’s trauma from her almost rape is there but she never really deals with it. But then at the end she is cool with it. Weird! Not to mention Sephy still doesn’t know about Hades business dealings, he is still keeping things from her but somehow he still thinks they are equals. Also what equal wouldn’t encourage you to protect yourself, encourage you to become better instead of baby you and try to lock you away continually. Also who edited this book? Repeated paragraphs and some sentences had so many errors I had to reread them and then try to interpret them from context clues. Yeah the characters were stagnant and the story development was drawn out and not really interesting. Not sure that I will read the next one. It felt so hard to get through this one.

Another stunning book written by Scarlett! I love this series so much. Brilliantly written :)

We are back with our favorite power couple, Hades X Persephone in A Touch of Malice. Just when I thought I couldn’t love this series more... I read ATOM. I couldn’t put it down. It’s riveting from start to finish. The stakes are higher, the romance is hotter, and the world gets bigger. As Hades X Persephone face the gods, we realize that we haven’t even skimmed the surface of their power and I’m so excited to see them grow. Drop what you are doing and read this heart-pounding series now.

A Touch of Malice is an excellent next step in the Hades X Persephone story. This book does a wonderful job of depicting personal growth, self acceptance and love, and the struggles of grief. The emotional development within Hades and Persephone’s relationship leads to even more of those spicy scenes we all love. I cannot wait to see what comes next in this series!

Umm WHAT??!! This book is by far my absolute FAVORITE in the series. I cannot put into words how much this book rocked my world. Scarlett St Clair wields her knowledge of Greek Mythology masterfully in A Touch of Malice. I finished this book in one day because I just couldn’t put it down. This book continues with Hades and Persephone slowly learning to communicate with each other. I absolutely loved the way the author wrote about Persephone’s PTSD from her experience in A Touch of Ruin. The character development for Persephone was so well written and Percy is SUCH A BADASS. Plus the spice in this book is HOT. By far the spiciest of this series for sure. The world building in this book has me reeling . Honestly I never missed a beat throughout this book and was enraptured in this amazing character arc for Hades and Persephone. I also loved the conversations about grieving and learning to live with the hurt that losing Lexa caused. It made me tear up honestly because she made the emotional components to this book so completely relatable. I completely recommend this book!! I have no idea what I will do with my life until the next one comes out, but I’m definitely a fan.

Come on! I bought this book in advance and was really looking forward to reading it but the numerous and stupidly obvious typos are ruining this for me because each time I stumble on one, I have to pull myself out of the story. It’s so aggravating— Argh! If the author had delayed publication by even a month to make sure someone proofed this properly, it would have at least made this mess bearable. But the typos and errors are so numerous you really have to wonder at the writer’s ability.Plus this book just felt rushed and not well planned out. Plot was paper thin. Characters did things that just didn’t make sense. Pacing was bad. Filled with repetitive dialogue too.And Hades and Persephone have too many sex scenes — yeah I like it when we get to see beyond the bedroom door — but 30 different scenes? Ok I didn’t count really but it felt like the author was just trying to pad the page count by throwing in so many sex scenes because there was nothing else to do. And don’t get me started on the cliffhanger ending. It just came out of nowhere — BOOM! This book is such a disappointment.

As a power reader, I got through the book in several hours with a lovely glass of wine. I appreciate the freshness of this Hades/Persephone retelling— I enjoy that the relationship is evolving beyond the dynamic explained in the first book. The characters are deliciously complicated and I can’t wait to read more.

'm a bit afraid of Chaos, to be honest *nervous laughter*But before Chaos, there's Malice. Going into reading this review, I hope you've read Darkness and Ruin because there might be mild spoilers for them.Things have become a bit worse - that's putting it mildly - what with Demeter practically declaring war on Persephone and Hades, for them being together.Natural disasters happen, lives are lost. People are starting to hate the gods again and riling each other up against them. Hate groups are going strong.Persephone is trying to wade through it all and, well, drama's bound to happen, her relationships - especially with Hades - are to be tested. The latter mostly because Hades is still the mysterious mofo that frustrates the heck out of me. So I'm eagerly awaiting for his POV because we will find out everything we were wondering about, while reading Malice.What I really love about this series, these books, this journey that we see through Persephone's eyes, that it became so complex and so much richer, than it was in the beginning, in Darkness.Imagine Darkness being a seed that was planted and now, Malice is this big and bushy gorgeous plant, ready to bloom - which is what Chaos will be. The heartaches, the loss, the growth, the dynamics between the characters - all of these play major roles in Persephone's arc and the story.Through it all, Persephone is also learning how to be a goddess, basically. So it's a bit too much to juggle but I think she does a good job. She makes the best of what she has.All in all, this book deals with a lot more than I mentioned here - consider my review the cliffnotes of Malice.So if you've loved Darkness and Ruin, definitely read Malice.I voluntarily read an early copy and am giving it 5 stars.

Firstly, let's address the elephant in the room:The two star rating has nothing to do with the numerous spelling/grammatical mistakes on the original Kindle version that I read [I understand that this has since been rectified].I loved the first two books and recommended them to anyone who would listen, but felt this book was lacking in plot and purpose.In A Touch of Darkness, we are introduced to Persephone, who is trying to find herself. There is forbidden love. In A Touch of Ruin, Persephone does find herself. The relationship is accepted. In A Touch of Malice, she is once again trying to find herself, despite having already done so in the previous book, and the romance is - once again - 'forbidden,' despite their being engaged.Hades & Persephone's relationship is extremely problematic, which also effected my rating of this book. I understand that Hades was supposed to be the macho, 'I'd burn down the world to look after you' kind-of-guy, but he was controlling. They lived together, worked in the same building and were together 24/7. Hades tracked her via her engagement ring for godsake! Disturbing.Now, it's common knowledge among those who read my reviews that I love a bit of steam as much as the next person - If not more. I adore a smutty book, but even I thought this had too many sex scenes in. Every time they saw each other, they had sex.I was so disappointed that I stopped reading at 51%.

Demeter has waged war on Persephone and Hades by creating and endless snowstorm on the Upperworld. In July.To make matters worse, an unidentified group has found a way to hurt and kill gods.Can Hades and Persephone stop Demeter, stop the terrorist group, get the Olympians to help, AND get Zeus’ blessing for their marriage?Persephone did a lot of growing up for this book which was great. She and Hades communicated a lot better, she didn’t have these all-encompassing emotional strops that were ever present in book 2, and she finally started to understand both sides of her magic.However, my biggest question is too much of a spoiler to state in its entirety….but WTF Persephone?! At the end, leading up to the arsenal room. Seriously I need to rant about this with someone but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone else by writing it here!Also, every other scene seemed to be a sex scene. I’m not complaining because I do love my smut, but some of it seemed to be just for the sake of having sex scenes. Others were plot-based or at least woven into the storyline. But it just seemed like all Persephone and Hades did was fight and have sex, proclaim their love and have sex, get hurt by others and have sex, go to a party and have sex, train and have sex…you get the picture.There isn’t a next book out yet but I’m reeeaaalllyyyy hoping there will be and that it will be released soon! Because this definitely ended in a cliffhanger.

I much preferred this book to the previous one. Although Persephone is suffering trauma from the previous book, her actions are less erratic and more relatable. The story was good, although there were a lot of sex scenes which I don’t necessarily mind, but at times it seemed like not much else was going on in the story.A lot of things that have been hinted at in the previous books are finally being explored in this book and leading to the eventual conclusion which makes their initial conclusion make much more sense. I think for me this is perhaps the best and most well balanced of the ‘A touch of...’ books so far, but I still think I prefer the ‘A game of...’ seeing events from Hades perspective, as I prefer his viewpoint and he seems to have more interesting sub plots.However as I’ve found with the previous books there were quite a few spelling mistakes, words missed and grammatical errors, mainly the wrong tenses being used e.g bath instead of bathe, queue instead of cue. I can forgive maybe one or two but when it probably exceeds 20, I find that quite unforgivable for a book that has been purchased. The editing process for these books needs to be a lot more thorough before they are published to the paying public.I now understand that the author has corrected the mistakes and a new and updated version can be downloaded but it is disappointing that this keeps happening with books by this author and it is unfortunately something I am now coming to expect.

I’ve been waiting in the edge of my seat for release day, I sped through the first two books and completely fell in love with Hades and Persephone.If you have a soft spot for Greek myths and are looking for some spice in your reading, ENJOY!I will say there were a couple of errors with words used, (conscious instead of conscience, queue instead of cue) and an instance of the wrong character name used, but I was so wrapped up in the story it didn’t bother me too much.