A Heart melting new adult romance with an edge

If you love a young adult enemies to lovers dark bully romance, then you will adore this book.
Renegade Hearts is Book 1 of the #RebelsOfSandlands series and while can be read as a standalone, it is interconnected heavy crossover with Nikki’s Soldiers of Anarchy series which I absolutely love as you get to catch up with friends old and new.

It was no surprise to me that I would love this story: I loved The Psycho so much – it’s on my repeat read/listens. I adore Nikki J Summers, she’s one of my favourite authors: her stories are so well written and is becoming my go-to for edgy New Adult romances that pack a punch and I particularly appreciate the way she manages to weave drama, suspense and humour combined with outstanding character development into her stories.
I am a big fan or Nikki’s writing style which combined with my love of flawed #BritshHeros and the beautiful #EnglishRose heroines that tame the #BadBoys make for some delicious books.

Renegade Hearts is Emily Winters and Ryan Hardy’s heart-thumping, sweet and tender story that features:

🇬🇧 Hero and Heroine
❤️#RebelsOfSandlandsSeries
🖤#NewAdault
❤️#DarkRomance
🖤Hate to Love 😍 Fireworks 🎆
🚫#Forbidden Romance
👁‍🗨#BullyRomance


Whilst Emily leads a ‘privileged’ life, she is the daughter of a politician. Her family is dysfunctional, and her parents show little interest in her and are too busy keeping up appearances for the world in what Emily describes as ‘fake’ for the benefit of the public given her father is prominent political figure.
She’s turned 18 and is considering how she can move forward and escape the ‘fake’ existence her parents represent. Emily is missing her late brother Danny who died in a car accident, in suspicious circumstances and misses him dearly.
Since the death of her brother Danny, her parents have been even more distanced from her, but at the same time they are very controlling of her life, as they care more about keeping up appearances to the public than her happiness and well-being.

Her 2 best mates: Effy and Liv are more like family to her and are her main support and together they Gatecrash an illegal party that’s run by the Renaissance Men: Ryan, Fin, Zack and Brandon. Ryan and Emily’s brother Danny were best mates. Emilys’ brother always discouraged her from every getting anywhere near his mates or any other boy for that matter.

Ryan and his mates: Fin, Zack and Brandon bully Emily and we discover they have a vendetta against her father and devise a plan to have Ryan get close to her and use her to avenge her brother’s death.

What both Ryan and Emily don’t count on is their attraction to each other: their chemistry is off the charts. What we end up discovering is that Ryan had a massive crush on Emily for years and stopped anyone else from getting near her. Ryan is so sweet with her, always making sure she is comfortable and never feels any pressured into anything and it melts my heart.
Emily is so brave in light of all the challenges in her family life, she is wise beyond her years in many situations and wears her heart on her sleeve and I adore how once she gave into her feelings for Ryan (when they both did) it melted my heart and I couldn’t help cheering them on.

Together they face some pretty confronting challenges on their way to their HEA: deception, betrayal and even a love triangle sort of. Be warned though this does end in a cliff hanger, so hopefully we don’t have too long to wait for the next audiobook, but if you can’t wait you can always read the actual book which I can appreciate.

The audiobook is performed in dual POV style by Shane East and Zara Hampton-Brown. Shane is my fave and Zara is new to me, but I fell in love with her and I’m obsessed! This is their 1st pairing together and they were the perfect Ryan and Emily.

Zara did much of the heavy lifting in this one, she portrayed Emily so flawlessly: our bad-ass sassy Politician’s daughter that everyone including Ryan thought was too posh and proper and under-estimated her strength and tenacity. I could listen to the dulcet tones of Zara’s beautiful British voice all day, she is a sweetheart and captures Emily’s emotions and her growth throughout the book perfectly, and her male voice is excellent as well. A heart melting moment for me was the following lines from Emily (Chapter 36):
“He was perfect. I was so glad I’d waited to find him. My person. My soul mate. My whole world.”


Shane’s performances keep getting better and better – he really does knock each performance out to the park. His portrayal of the young tough guy Ryan with the soft centre and big heart for his beautiful Emily was heart-meltingly perfect.
#BadBoyShane is a favourite and there’s always a redeeming quality to his heroes and captured Ryan’s emotions and his character growth in the story faultlessly as the gritty young man who is trying to fit in with his mates while transforming to the determined and vulnerable Ryan who has the courage to put his heart on the line and do anything for his Emily and be there for her. Shane’s performance brought me to tears (Chapter 35):
“I had to be there for her even if she wanted to use me as her punching bag I would take it…” This man is so talented he blows me away with every performance, and this was no exception. Shane is exceptional.

Overall I loved Ryan and Emily’s story and I fell hard for them along with the amazing performance of Shane and Zara who brought them to life. I devoured this audiobook and it will definitely be in my repeat listens/reads and I am looking forward to the next book (2) in this series: Tortured Souls.

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