BREAK ME LIKE A PROMISE

Magnolia Grace has to decide whom she's going to be loyal to in a time of intense transition—her family, her family's business, or herself.

After her boyfriend is killed by traitors to the family's illegal organ-donation business, white Texas debutante Maggie spends several weeks in bed, losing much of the clout she'd struggled to achieve with her father and his colleagues. When she realizes that her father is about to make a policy shift that will change the business and their lives forever, she manages to rouse herself to fight his decisions. However, she's distracted by the presence of Alex, a young Latino man who is in desperate need of a kidney. Alex shows her that the fight she's joined might not be in the best interest of the hundreds of thousands of sick people who need new organs and that her motives are selfish, even as she's trying to save his life. The second book in the Once Upon a Crime Family series about an extended family of criminals portrays a strong young woman at a point in her life when everything she thought she knew turns out to be wrong, supplying readers with a riveting (if contrived) storyline. However, Maggie's moral education about what it means to be privileged feels overstated and forced.

A passably successful story about a woman who needs to let go of her past to accept her future.