Review--Guillotine by Delilah S. Dawson

 

The Menu meets Ready or Not in this dark tale of opulent luxury and shocking violence from the New York Times bestselling author of Bloom.

Thrift fashionista Dez Lane doesn't want to date Patrick Ruskin; she just wants to meet his mother, the editor-in-chief of Nouveau magazine. When he invites her to his family's big Easter reunion at their ancestral home, she's certain she can put up with his arrogance and fend off his advances long enough to ask Marie Caulfield-Ruskin for an internship someone with her pedigree could never nab through the regular submission route.

When they arrive at the enormous island mansion, Dez is floored—she's never witnessed how the 1% lives before in all their ridiculous, unnecessary luxury. But once all the family members are on the island and the ferry has departed, things take a dark turn. For decades, the Ruskins have made their servants sign contracts that are basically indentured servitude, and with nothing to lose, the servants have decided their only route to freedom is to get rid of the Ruskins for good…

Since I still had a few hours left in the day before I went to pickup my next read, I started yet another shorter read and landed on Delilah S. Dawson's Guillotine and it was epic! If you're a fan of thrillers and revenge stories than you are going to love this one! Be forewarned, it's not for the faint of heart as there's quite a bit of violence and gore in this one.

Dez is nearly finished with her schooling and longs to land her dream job and that is working with Marie Caulfield-Ruskin at her magazine, Nouveau. Unfortunately her best shot at that will be to accept the offer of a date with Patrick Ruskin. Patrick is your typical rich dude, skeevy and entitled and clearly only sees one thing when he asks Dez for a date, but Dez decides she will play the player.

In a roundabout way, she snags an invitation with him to attend the Ruskin Easter celebration on their own private island at their private estate. She signs a bunch of NDA disclosures and surrenders her cell phone, all for a chance to meet her idol, Marie. Things start off in a typical way one might expect of the rich and famous parties. They are a seemingly cold and aloof family. They have a fleet of staff all dressed in pink to wait on them hand and foot in every nook and cranny of the estate.

Then at dinner one night, things take a deadly turn and the staff turns on the Ruskin family. Soon it becomes a deadly game of hide and seek, almost where the Ruskins are hunted down one by one and the staff exacts their revenge on their employers and Dez is caught in the crossfires. There's no way to escape the island itself and help is likely not to come anytime soon.

This book was seriously chilling! I mean in one way, I loved it! I love a good revenge plot! Yes, murder might be taking it too far, but we do get some insight to what happened to the staff members and the horrors that were inflicted upon them. That was the real horror story of the novel. Being tormented and there being no one to help you because your tormentor is rich enough to pay for their innocence. So yes, the revenge aspect of this story was delightful. Lol.

It's a relatively quick read at 200 pages, which I guess is what we call a novella these days! While it does take to about the halfway point for the danger to begin, the story was still pretty engaging until then. Dez is a woman who knows what she wants and is willing to do whatever necessary to make her dreams come true. But she starts to realize maybe her dreams were slightly off base. She does a bit of self-discovery in this one while running for her life.

I loved how intense this story was! I mean people were literally running for their lives and there was no way to escape the danger. I kept debating how I thought this book would end and one of my theories rang true at least! 

If you love thrillers bridging on horror, then you are going to love this one! It's the perfect tale of revenge and why one should always be a good person with a good heart and treat people with kindness.

Overall Rating 5/5 stars