Rating: ★★★★★

Genre: Dark Romance

Available On: Amazon (though I highly recommend the Audiobooks)

Before we get into this, the usual warning for my Mindf*ck reviews applies: this is absolutely not spoiler-free. If you haven’t read my reviews of The Risk and Sidetracked yet, start there. Because book three doesn’t just continue the story. Scarlet Angel is the point where the whole Mindfuck Series gets bigger.

And, honestly, I think it’s the best of the first three.

It’s certainly the most complex read so far.

The first two books were each given one very narrow thing to do, and they do it well. The Risk introduces Lana and Logan and lights the fuse. Sidetracked widens Lana’s world, particularly through Hadley, Ferguson, and Laurel.

But then Delaney Grove comes properly into Scarlet Angel and suddenly everything sprawls. We get to see more of the FBI team in action. The team get to do their jobs on page, going places, talking to people, working a case fully. We got snippets of this in the first two books, but it was largely the team discussing a case rather than working it on page.

At the same time, Lana and Jake are actively doing more chaotic serial murdery shit.

The first two books give us the occasional (albeit brutal) glimpse of Lana carrying out her revenge, while dealing with the consequences of everything happening around it, and her growing relationship with Logan.

Scarlet Angel is the first time we really see the mechanism these two have built in order to pull this whole thing off. It’s spectacular (if spectacularly unlikely, but suspension of disbelief remains intact!). And it changes everything.

Plemmons Was Never Really The Point

Scarlet Angel opens on the cliff Sidetracked abandoned us on. The first scene of the novel is also the one that always comes into my head when I think about book three: Lana killing Plemmons. The serial killer Logan and his team were after for two books targeted his girlfriend (largely because she goaded him into it) and she unceremoniously unalives him with very little effort.

It’s hilarious.

Probably not meant to be entirely hilarious (there goes my twisted sense of humour again). Although, to be fair, I think some of it absolutely is even by sane people standards.

Because Plemmons proves exactly what I thought about him in Sidetracked: you can’t really take this guy seriously as a threat to Lana.

He does manage to catch her off guard. Kudos to him for that. But him showing up was exactly what she wanted to happen, so she could eliminate him in order to protect Logan…and being caught off guard gives him the upper hand for all of about thirty seconds, so…

How is this dude not in prison yet? Like, seriously? 

His biggest problem is that it never seems to occur to him that a woman could be any kind of threat to him whatsoever.

The possibility simply doesn’t enter his stupid meathead.

If he were in a room with a man, I don’t think he would behave the same way. He would (presumably) have some awareness that the man might fight back, might try to hurt him, might pose an actual danger.

With Lana?

Nothing.

He drastically underestimates her because the notion she might be genuinely capable of hurting him seems to sit completely outside his understanding of women.

Which makes watching her systematically dismantle him deeply satisfying.

It also makes Plemmons slightly disappointing. If he’d been more competent, Lana beating him would have been even better. It’s the one weakness of Plemmons across these books; he’s never developed enough as a threat.

The FBI have supposedly spent two books trying to catch him (longer, actually, I think they were already on the case at the start of book one), but once we see him in action (so to speak), there isn’t much there. 

You don’t think, Jesus Christ, no wonder they couldn’t find this man.

If anything, the opposite.

The knock-on of that is that the first two books never really get to demonstrate how competent Logan’s team are, because the main case they’re dealing with isn’t sophisticated enough to let them show it. And the other case is solved fairly easily.

But Plemmons does exactly what he actually exists to do.

The mistake is assuming Plemmons’ narrative job has anything to do with Plemmons.

Plemmons Exists For Lana And Hadley

You would think the culmination of a serial killer investigation running across multiple books should be the satisfaction of finally catching the killer.

It isn’t.

Nobody gives a shit about closing the Plemmons case. He was never really there to be an investigation or a mystery to solve. He’s a counterpoint to Lana. And, more importantly, he’s the device that lets Hadley finally understand what’s going on with Lana.

That’s the achievement of Plemmons’ entire arc.

Hadley’s already spent two books knowing there’s something off with Lana. She’s right, of course. But suspicion and actually seeing Lana do it are completely different things. Hadley doesn’t discover another abstract secret about Lana’s backstory in Scarlet Angel, the whole book kicks off with her witnessing Lana kill Plemmons.

And I don’t think Hadley could’ve understood Lana without witnessing.

If Lana had just sat Hadley down and said, “Right, here’s my tragic backstory, here’s why I kill folk, here’s how much I love Logan”, Hadley would have every reason in the world to think she was being manipulated. She’d never have even contemplated believing Lana.

Instead, Hadley hears Lana explain herself while Lana has no idea she’s listening. Hadley knows nothing Lana’s saying is for her benefit. It’s not staged to persuade her. Which makes the ridiculous amount of monologuing Lana does at the beginning of this book simultaneously necessary and probably my biggest pet peeve for Scarlet Angel.

It is very plot-fairy convenient.

Lana conveniently launches into a detailed explanation of exactly what she’s been up to and how she feels about Logan, while the one person who desperately needed to understand all that happens to be hidden in the closet listening.

I understand why ST Abby did it. I’m not entirely sure there was a completely elegant alternative. Hadley had to hear this from Lana’s own mouth without Lana knowing Hadley was listening.

But the plot mechanism is painfully visible.

If Plemmons had been a true threat and somehow forced the information out of Lana, or the conversation had been baited out more naturally, I think it could have worked better. Still, the function it serves is important enough that I’ll forgive the convenient villain (well, anti-hero) monologuing.

Being Witnessed By Hadley Breaks Open Lana’s Character

Lana’s never had an issue with doing what she does. But nobody other than Jake has ever witnessed that side of her before. Her entire life depends on compartmentalisation.

There is Lana. There was Victoria. There’s Jake. There’s Logan. There’s the revenge.

And Lana keeps all those things separate because she has to.

Then Hadley sees.

Somebody from outside the tiny closed world of Lana and Jake witnesses what she actually is. And Hadley doesn’t immediately turn her in. She gives Lana a chance to explain. That cracks something open in Lana, because once Hadley sees her and stays, Lana can’t fully compartmentalise anymore.

She can’t go back to believing that the second anybody sees the whole of her, everything immediately ends. And once those walls start coming down, everything else starts creeping in.

The possibility of a future. Of having something after all of this. The possibility of Logan. She actually considers stopping. She decides not to, but she does genuinely think about it. Logan has changed her enough that stopping is now a question, where it never could have been before.

He hasn’t changed her answer, but he (and now Hadley) have changed her.

Hadley Not Turning Lana In Makes Perfect Sense

Now, you might find it weird that an FBI gal doesn’t immediately turn Lana in. But I completely buy Hadley’s decision. Book-one Hadley probably would have run straight to Logan with every theory she had.

But this isn’t book-one Hadley.

She’s just been forced to confront Ferguson. Had the reality of her own childhood dragged back into the light. Discovered that the man who abused her went on to hurt countless other children.

And then Laurel appeared. A little girl who was about to become another version of Hadley.

Same man.

Same vulnerability.

Except this time somebody saved her.

So when Hadley starts connecting Laurel to Lana, she’s not looking at a case anymore. On some level, her brain is asking, “Did Lana just save this girl the way nobody saved me?”

And the obvious subconscious follow-up, “Did Lana just save me?”

That changes everything.

If Laurel had been an unrelated girl in an unrelated case, Hadley might have reacted very differently. But this is personal. And it has to be. Beyond that, Hadley isn’t exactly some rigid embodiment of the letter of the law.

She’s a hacker.

That’s literally how she ended up at the FBI. Breaking rules isn’t alien to her personality. So withholding the truth from Logan doesn’t require Hadley to become somebody fundamentally different. It’s a choice that makes complete sense for the character ST Abby has already built across two books.

Lana Telling Hadley The Truth Is Her Only Real Option

Once Hadley genuinely knows, Lana has to tell her the truth. By her own code, there’s no other option. She can’t threaten her, manipulate her, terrorise her into silence. She can’t really even lie to her. Doing any of those things would make Lana exactly the kind of person her entire moral framework exists to punish.

Becoming the thing she’s bent on punishing would destroy Lana psychologically. It would be a level of hypocrisy she simply couldn’t tolerate. So once Hadley knows, Lana’s only real option is to tell her the truth, and hope she understands.

Sidetracked already started establishing Lana’s moral code and this solidifies it. Her morality doesn’t merely determine who she is allowed to punish. It determines what she’s allowed to do to protect herself.

She has rules. They apply to her as well as the men she’s going after. They always have. What changes through the Mindfuck Series isn’t Lana’s morality, but the scale at which we see her morality operating.

Book Three Belongs To Delaney Grove

I said Sidetracked was Hadley’s book. Scarlet Angel belongs to Delaney Grove. The town has been hovering over the story since the beginning. We know Lana and Marcus came from there. We know terrible things happened there. We know Logan’s investigation has started circling the town and there’s an oddness to it that the team have already picked up on. We’ve heard the team reporting back on what people there have said.

But even when Lana took Laurel back to somebody from her old life in Delaney Grove in Sidetracked, the town is still largely something we understand through history.

Scarlet Angel turns the town into a full member of the cast.

We see how warped the place actually is. There’s obviously a central figure behind much of that culture, but the problem has grown far beyond one man. It seeped into the whole town, the controlling nature of it, the hierarchy, the things everybody knows and nobody acknowledges. People are aware and simply choose to ignore. Everybody has accepted this as the status quo.

This is the book where Delaney Grove stops being the place where something terrible happened and becomes an antagonist.

Terrorising The Whole Town Still Fits Lana’s Rules

Which was a very clever move, because it means Lana and Jake escalating from killing individual people to psychologically terrorising an entire town works. It doesn’t represent Lana abandoning proportional justice. It is proportional justice.

The whole town knew. Many knew what was happening to Lana and Marcus as it happened and did nothing. Nobody came to help them. People turned a blind eye. Afterwards, everybody behaved as though nothing happened.

They erased it, so when Lana and Jake return they make it impossible to ignore. The blood, the red paint, the water, the creepy-arse messages appearing from nowhere, the fear mongering. 

The town that pretended nothing happened is suddenly forced to live inside a truth they’ve spent years pretending didn’t exist.

If Lana suddenly decided everybody in Delaney Grove deserved exactly the same punishment as the men who physically hurt her, that would contradict her moral code. But that isn’t what she does. Different actions receive different consequences. 

The scale of her vengeance changes, but the rule never does.

Jake Doesn’t Change, But What We Know About Him Does

Jake becomes much more important from this book onwards, but I don’t think Jake changes in Scarlet Angel. Not the way Hadley does in Sidetracked. This book isn’t a growth arc for Jake, it just changes how much of Jake we understand.

This is one of the real strengths of these books. They avoid info-dumping backstory merely because the reader hasn’t been told it yet. (A point I particularly appreciate as I’m currently reading Game On and exceedingly frustrated by the flagrant exposition dumping going on).

Nobody likes an expo-dump. And until this point, we’ve mostly seen Jake through Lana’s eyes, and Lana already knows him. His history, his relationship with Marcus, why he’s helping her.

There’s no natural reason for her to sit around mentally monologuing Jake’s biography for our benefit in the first two books, so she doesn’t.

His history comes out when it becomes relevant. As he and Lana have deeper conversations, debate whether to continue, and their shared past becomes pertinent to their current decision-making rather than being an explanation of how they got here.

That’s how these books work. Information appears because something in the story gives it a reason to arrive. And learning more about Jake changes our understanding of the revenge. This has never simply been Lana’s mission with a very loyal hacker helping her.

Jake lost Marcus too.

The revenge belongs to him, too. Not in the same way, but it’s still his.

Logan Sees Lana, He Just Can’t Connect Her To The Killer

Scarlet Angel is also the first book where Logan’s team really gets the chance to demonstrate what they do. We mostly experience them as an FBI team through Logan having conversations with them in the first two books. Now we actually see them working, going places, talking to people, following connections, finding inconsistencies, interviewing people, watching a case change shape as new information arrives.

And they’re competent.

Which, ironically, makes Logan not recognising Lana considerably more believable to me rather than less.

The issue with the whole concept of the Mindfuck Series was always going to be creating a believable FBI profiler who could date a serial killer and not realise. Like…how does he not see it? 

But I don’t think Logan fails to see Lana. He sees her extremely well. Her vulnerability, the damage, the contradictions, her intelligence, her fight, her strength.

He sees how deeply she feels things.

And then he falls in love with her.

The reason he can’t see the killer in her is partly because he can see Lana. The profile he has for the serial killer they’re hunting doesn’t fit the woman he knows. Lana isn’t your average psychopathic serial killer.

She’s emotional, empathetic, she attaches to people very deeply (albeit very selectively), and she loves people, she cares.

A lot of the tells you might reasonably expect Logan to recognise in a serial killer because they lack empathy or meaningful human attachment simply don’t exist in Lana. She doesn’t kill because she’s a psychopath. Genuinely, she’s not a psychopath (though she does have psychopathic traits). She’s a very weird case. But Logan and the team have profiled and are looking for a psychopath.

And Lana isn’t a psychopath.

But beyond that, Logan’s working without crucial information. So, he notices things about her, and he gets things wrong, so he reassesses. It’s not that he’s blind to it. He’s not; he’s constantly profiling her, even when he tries not to. He’s just aware she’s a complex puzzle and every time he thinks he’s solved her, he finds he hasn’t. Which, to him, is part of the appeal. She’s complicated and deep and he likes that about her. He can’t immediately understand her, which for a man like him must be something of a relief. 

In trying to puzzle her out, he presses against parts of her history and rapidly realises they’re sensitive subjects. But this is his girlfriend, not an unsub, so he does the completely reasonable human thing and backs off.

He lets the woman he loves tell him traumatic things when she’s ready.

Which is totally reasonable. You don’t immediately demand an account of every traumatic thing that ever happened so you can correctly profile your girlfriend. If Logan treated every contradiction in Lana’s behaviour as evidence in an interrogation, he might be an excellent FBI profiler. But he’d be a catastrophic boyfriend.

And he’s not. He’s a fabulous boyfriend. One of my favourite book boyfriends, to be honest. (Though, total transparency, I’m more interested in Lana as a book girlfriend in this series!)

So while you could read Scarlet Angel (and most of the series, tbh) as proof that Logan is incompetent, he’s not. He’s just interpreting the correct evidence through the wrong framework because he doesn’t view Lana as an unsub, and crucially, he still doesn’t have the information and evidence that can connect this case to a woman.

Let alone to Lana specifically.

The Romance Isn’t About Falling In Love Anymore

The other big thing that changes in Scarlet Angel is the romance. The question’s no longer whether Lana and Logan are going to fall in love.

They already have.

Now the driving force in their relationship is What the fuck happens when he finds out?

These are spicy books. And very good spice, I might add, which is a point I’ve probably undersold in my first two reviews of the series because I’m honestly so fascinated by the story that I forget to say it. 

But Lana and Logan are hot. On page, full-throttle spicy times on a regular basis which, for such short books with so much to (ahem) fit in, is saying something. We’re not given the usual dark romance smorgasbord of ‘oh look they have kinks’ either. Which, to be fair, I do enjoy (I’d normally cite the Into Darkness series for being guilty of exactly this but in a good way. However, Game On is currently testing my tolerance for it.)

This shift in their relationship makes every sweet or spicy moment between them increasingly loaded. When they’re together, there’s something almost innocent about their relationship. They’re so open with each other, willingly give themselves to each other, while simultaneously having to keep enormous parts of their lives separate.

Logan compartmentalises his work because he wants to protect Lana and their relationship from it. Lana compartmentalises her extracurricular activities for basically the same reason.

And she tries incredibly hard not to lie to him more than she has to. Even when she has to tell him something that technically isn’t true, she tries to build it out of truths. She talks about her parents in ways that fit the history Logan knows while still telling him genuine things about them. Her explanation for her injuries is false; it’s the car crash backstory of Kennedy Carlyle. But what she tells him about how those injuries affected her is real and visceral. She gives him herself.

Just never all of herself.

Which makes the eventual truth far more interesting than if their entire relationship were simply based on a fake persona. He hasn’t fallen in love with a fake; the woman he loves is real and was real with him, there are just parts of her he doesn’t know about yet.

The Darkness Had To Escalate In This Book

Scarlet Angel gives us much more of what actually happened to Lana and Marcus. The upshot of that is the series gets a lot more graphic as it goes. Some readers find that too much and quit on it. Which, fair. It’s a lot. And there are so many trigger warnings needed for it that there’s genuinely a lot going on that isn’t going to be palatable for a lot of readers.

But I wouldn’t call it gratuitous. It needs to be that graphic. There’s no way to understand why Lana and Jake are doing what they’re doing, to fully endorse their revenge, or see why they’re willing to take it to such extremes, without understanding the core of the thing they’re reacting to.

The series earnt the level of detail by not giving it to us immediately. If The Risk had opened by dumping the full horror of Lana and Marcus’s past onto the page, it would’ve been too much. Instead, the series escalates. Book one introduces the darkness. Book two gives us Ferguson. Book three pushes considerably further.

You’re allowed to acclimatise to the world before Abby shows you its worst parts. And from a series perspective, that escalation is necessary. If book three were still only operating at the same level of darkness as book one, it would begin to feel flat.

Whether readers consciously notice it or not, a five-book dark romance series that never escalates would become deeply unsatisfying. 

The darkness has to deepen as the series does.

Lana And Hadley Are Shit At Friendship

One of the best new things in Scarlet Angel is the emergence of a better Lana and Hadley dynamic. I really like them together as a sort-of-friendship duo. Not that they immediately become best friends. It’s more of an odd frenemy friendship.

They go from being wary of each other, to openly hostile, to having grudging respect, to sort of like each other, but still sort of don’t.

Hadley was slightly insufferable in The Risk. She improves enormously in Sidetracked. Now she gets something she doesn’t seem particularly good at having: a female friend.

Unfortunately, Hadley’s not very functional where friendship is concerned. But then neither is Lana.

So it works.

There’s something much more believable about them awkwardly learning to care about each other while continuing to irritate the shit out of each other. If Hadley had discovered Lana’s secret and immediately become her ride-or-die bestie, it would have been bizarre and very out of character for both of them.

Instead their friendship gets to grow, stutteringly, across the whole series. And neither woman has to suddenly become a different person to make it happen.

Victoria Is The Real Cliffhanger

Structurally the thing the Mindfuck Series does so spectacularly well is the cliffhanger ending of each book. It makes it impossible to not immediately crave the next instalment. I read all five straight through in one sitting, then went back to the start to re-read. I’ve since read them all multiple times (hence my somewhat obsessive dissection of the plot of each!). Book one ended on Hadley pitching up at Lana’s house, threatening to expose her for stealing Kennedy Carlyle’s identity. Book two closed on Plemmons blindsiding Lana back at that same house and the imminent question of, Oh, shit, what’s she going to do to him? (No. We were never worried what The Bogeyman would do to her, that’s not why that ending worked!)

But cliffhanger at the end of Scarlet Angel isn’t about Lana at all.

It’s about Victoria.

Until this point, Logan has had absolutely no reason to suspect that a woman Lana’s age has anything to do with the case. This is why he’s not failing to notice the serial killer he’s looking for is his girlfriend. The notion of a woman being involved hasn’t seriously come up outside one team member commenting that the genital mutilation reads as female rage. And then it’s immediately countered by the good old cliched ‘Female serial killers use poison, a woman couldn’t physically manage to do this shit’ line. 

Nothing in the information available to Logan points in the direction of a woman with a potential motive to be the vigilante. At the end of Scarlet Angel he finally reaches somebody prepared to tell him about the Evans children.

And we know that means Victoria and Marcus. And we know Lana is Victoria. And suddenly Victoria is about to exist inside Logan’s investigation and give him a dot that can point him to Lana.

That’s the reveal.

The danger isn’t that someone’s about to tell him Lana is Victoria, and Victoria is behind all this. They all think Victoria is dead. The important thing is that Logan’s about to learn there was a woman at the centre of this story.

Logan and the team are about to be handed the piece of information that makes considering Lana’s involvement possible.

He still has to connect Victoria to Lana. And, as we discover later, he manages to get there in spectacularly the wrong way before he gets there properly (typical Logan). But that comes later.

For now, the book ends at exactly the moment where the geometry of his investigation completely changes. 

And because we know how Logan thinks, we now know it’s only a matter of time before the dots draw a Lana-shaped picture in his FBI notebook.

Scarlet Angel Is Where Mindfuck Gets Bigger

Scarlet Angel is the best book of the first three. Not because The Risk or Sidetracked do anything badly (they’re great). But Scarlet Angel is where everything begins to sprawl. Delaney Grove becomes an antagonist rather than backstory, the FBI now poses a serious risk of exposing Lana, Jake becomes someone we understand, and Hadley knows.

Lana can’t keep every part of herself neatly separated anymore. The revenge gets bigger, all the relationships get deeper (not just Lana and Logan’s), the darkness escalates, and Logan finally gets close enough to the truth for discovery to stop feeling hypothetical.

The first two books built all the pieces. Scarlet Angel suddenly starts converging on them all at once.

And from here on out, the Mindfuck Series only gets messier.

Which, frankly, is exactly what I want.