Review: Haven’s Creed by Parker Williams

Author: Parker Williams

Pages/Word Count: 256 Pages

At a Glance: All in all, this is not a bad read, but it’s the type of story I wouldn’t read more than once, mainly because of its subject matter.

Reviewed By: Kim

Blurb: An act of violence destroys his family and ends the life he knows. To escape his haunted past, he joins the military, where, as a sniper, he is trained to kill with precision and detachment. When a covert organization offers him a new purpose, he becomes Haven, an operative devoted to protecting the innocent when he can and avenging them when he cannot.

After ten years of battling the evil in the world, the life no longer holds the attraction or meaning it once had, and he’s ready to walk away. Then he meets Samuel, a young man forced from the age of twelve to work as a sex slave. If ever a man had a need for Haven, it is this one.

Yet nothing about this growing relationship is one-sided. Sammy gives Haven a stability he’s never known, and Haven becomes the rock upon which Sammy knows he can depend.

When Sammy reveals something about the enemy Haven has been hunting for months, Sammy fears it will destroy what they’ve built and he’ll lose his home in Haven’s heart.

Review: Haven made his first kill at the age of fifteen, when he came home to find that his sister had been brutally beaten by his mother’s boyfriend. Picking up the gun that Arnie had dropped, it took one look at his sister’s crumpled body, and Arnie’s taunting, to put a hole in his head.

The police and the courts ruled it was justifiable.

I would hope so since his sister never recovered from the head trauma this jerk inflicted. And their mom should have been charged with failing to protect her children. And, to add insult to injury, his mother then abandoned them both to their faith not long after the incident.

As soon as Haven turned eighteen he joined the Army, where he did so well with a rifle that he was sent to sniper training. Because he’s a bit of a misfit, Haven comes under the notice of a covert operations head who seems to think that maybe Haven would be perfect for a job offer. As the blurb states, Haven would later become what I would call a vigilante assassin.

After ten years as an assassin, Haven begins to question whether he should move on, with thoughts such as this:

“This job belonged to a younger man. One with the ideals I used to have. One who thought he could go out and change the world, not one who knew for certain the world had moved on without him.”

But there is one more job yet to do, and it’s worse than any that Haven has come across in his line of work. It’s on this particular job that Haven is setting things up to take out the nasty head of a child sex ring when he comes across Samuel…

I will point out that Haven’s Creed surprised me with a twist or two, but the one that stood out the most was that Haven was at a point in his life where he needed someone to lean on, and that person turned out to be Samuel. This made me wonder who needed help the most. I also appreciated that the author wasn’t going for the shock value in the story. In other words, I didn’t physically cringe or become queasy with overly descriptive or gory details as to what had happened to the victims. As for the a-holes in this story…well, I surprised myself at how bloodthirsty I was. I felt some of them got off way too easy—with an easy kill. I thought they should have experienced a little of their victims’ pain before meeting their end.

I was warned that Haven’s Creed was going to be a dark read because of its subject matter, and anything dealing with child slavery is pretty dark, indeed. All in all, this is not a bad read, but it’s the type of story I wouldn’t read more than once, mainly because of its subject matter.

TNA_Signature_Kim