THE ENDS OF THE WORLD

A millennia-old global conspiracy comes to a climax with all the overwrought personal drama this trilogy has promised.

Avery, once an ordinary, violet-eyed American white girl, now is identified as a member of the world-ruling cabal, the Circle of Twelve. Since the time of Alexander the Great, the Circle’s families have secretly controlled the world’s governments, corporations, and media—but they still anticipate the prophecy of the girl with violet eyes and the One. Now Avery knows that she and white, blond, Russian Stellan (her one-time kidnapper, one-time smoocher) are the two destined to change everything. Avery’s blood, when mixed with Stellan’s, produces one of the deadliest biological weapons the world has ever known. Her recently rediscovered Circle family commits gleeful mass murder with Avery’s stolen blood in a quest for power. The series’ trademark sudden-yet-inevitable betrayals cause dramatic uproar but have minimal effect on the plot. Given the deadly risk if their blood is mixed, Avery and Stellan’s romantic choices (petting each other’s freshly inked matching tattoos; insisting on dashing off together into an obvious trap; bandaging each other’s blood-soaked wounds when other potential medics are available) serve only to diminish the importance of impending doom.

Uneven prose and illogical events abound in what’s clearly not the foretold savior of epic forbidden-love trilogies