The Thorns Remain by Jennifer Hartmann

 The Thorns Remain

by Jennifer Hartmann

My Rating: 🟊🟊🟊🟊🟊

Spice Rating: 🌶🌶

Blurb:

I used to be someone: an up-and-coming writer, a doting father, a husband who believed he was the center of his wife’s universe.

Then everything crumbled.

Thanks to Benjamin Grant, I became a joke. A divorced man. A shell. Thirsty for revenge, I needed him to feel the weight of loss like I did.

Enter Josie—Benjamin's wife and the key to my vendetta. My aim was to infiltrate her life, seduce her, and use that to hit my enemy where it hurt most. It was supposed to be straightforward. But as any writer knows, stories rarely stick to the script. Now I’m caught in a plot twist I never intended to write.

Vengeance was the goal, and Josie Grant was my way in.
I never meant to fall in love with her.
Now?
There’s no way out.

My Review: 

I’ll admit it, when I first picked this up, I wasn’t completely sold on the male POV. It threw me for a second. I wasn’t sure if I was going to connect with it the way I usually do with her books.

And then Jennifer Hartmann did what she always does. She broke me anyway.

There’s something almost unfair about the way she writes, like she quietly lures you in, lets you settle, and then slowly pulls the ground out from under you. I don’t think I’ve ever finished one of her books without feeling a little cracked open afterward, like my heart has been handled too carefully and too roughly all at once. And yet… I keep coming back. Every single time.

This story is heavy with revenge, but it’s not just about anger, it’s about what anger becomes when you let it live in you too long. Evan’s mission is to make the man who destroyed his life feel even a fraction of his pain. It’s raw, consuming, and at times almost painful to watch unfold, because you can feel how badly he believes he needs this.

But revenge doesn’t stay neatly contained. It spills. It twists. It takes more than it promises. And in chasing destruction, Evan ends up standing in the wreckage of his own making, only to find something he never expected blooming in the ruins.

And that’s what makes it hurt in the best way: love showing up in the middle of devastation. Not clean. Not easy. Not deserved. Just… real.

If there’s anything this book left me sitting with, it’s this: revenge feels powerful until it isn’t. Until it costs more than it gives. And sometimes the hardest thing isn’t getting even it’s choosing to stop, breathe, and let yourself live outside of the pain that’s been driving you.

It made me uncomfortable. It made me think. And, like every Jennifer Hartmann book I’ve read, it left a mark I won’t easily shake.