Three stars means I Liked It.. yeah, that' about right. This will be a fun summer movie when it's optioned. The characters are all right (though the women are really really really one-dimensional, and worse in the audiobook voicing); the plot is pretty predictable, but the pacing is fantastic. It's enjoyable with these limitations. ( )

Thriller

Although much grittier than my tastes, I devoured this book. Main character, a killer by trade falls in love but soon becomes embroiled in a dark war with the mob. Good writer. ( )

Iron House sucked me in fast and it was hard to put down. I was in the mood for a good page-turner and this book left me satisfied.

Michael is a trained killer with a heart who has fallen in love and wants out of the mob business after his girlfriend, Elena, tells him she's pregnant. As a teenager Michael had been taken in by a mob boss who'd heard about the tough orphan who controlled his own little piece of the streets of New York City after fleeing from a brutal orphanage in North Carolina. The mob boss becomes the father he never had, a father who loves Michael more than he does his biological son. The mob boss released Michael from the business, but the two guys left in charge of the business don't agree with the old man's decision. The old man dies and everything hits the fan. Elena's life is on the line and then so is Julian's life. Julian is Michael's younger brother, the brother he hasn't seen since the night he ran away from the orphanage with a bloody knife in his hand.

Michael finds himself running from the only family he knew in order to protect the new family he wants only to get tangled up in the lies and secrets of the old family he didn't know he had. There's a wealthy senator and his beautiful wife, brutal boys, sadistic men, and lots of dead bodies in this story, but ultimately its about love and family and how love and family mean different things at different times to different people. There are several scenes with graphic violence involving torture but they are not gratuitous within the context of the story and convey the seriousness of the situation and show why some psychic wounds run so deep.

Read the rest of my review here http://wildmoobooks.blogspot.com/2011/07/iron-house-by-john-hart.html ( )

I would rate it 3.5 stars if I could. It was interesting, pretty violent (although most of the victims probably deserved it), with some strange surprises at the end. One problem is that although I sympathized with the main protagonist, he spent much of his life as a hired killer for a well-known gangster, so it was not so easy to want him to win. But he was trying to change, and he didn't really choose his former life, so I could overlook this part of him.

Some of the violence was a bit over the top, so if you don't like that sort of thing, you may want to think twice about reading this. ( )