Twisted Tome (Devastating Magic #2) by Vanora Lawless

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A stubborn empath. A passionate dreamwalker. A love worth fighting for.
For empathic illusionist Warren ‘Sully’ Sullivan dreamwalking Captain Elliot Stone is more than the only thing keeping him sane and safe. He’s the keeper of Sully’s heart, even if he can’t seem to admit it out loud.
When an ancient grimoire infused with catastrophic magic comes into play, they’ve got to do everything in their power to keep it from landing in enemy hands. Unfortunately, that means working closely with a man who once shattered Elliot’s heart. Someone he would have done anything for.
As insecurity and fear threaten the fledgling relationship between Elliot and Sully, will the darkness closing in around them bring them closer or tear them apart forever?
Rating: A
Middle books in trilogies can often be disappointing, seeming to tread water between the set up in book one, and the finale in book three, but thankfully,  Twisted Tome  ( Devastating Magic  book two) is not one of those books! Vanora Lawless has followed up their fantastic début,  Imperfect Illusions ,  with another fast-paced, compelling and high-stakes story that continues the overarching plot begun previously and combines it with some absolutely stellar character and relationship development while upping the stakes and setting up what looks likely to be a really exciting final instalment.
Note:  Devastating Magic  is a same-couple trilogy and  Twisted Tome  won’t work as a standalone, so readers are advised to read  Imperfect Illusions  first. There are spoilers for that book in this review.
When  Twisted Tome  begins, the small, specialist unit of skilled (magic-users) soldiers led by Captain Elliot Stone – and which includes his lover, Corporal Warren Sullivan – have been tasked with the rescue of a French soldier from behind enemy lines – something they’ve been doing regularly for several months. But when they arrive back at their safe house, they discover that this was no simple rescue mission; Lucien D’Aramitz tells them that the dangerous magical artifact (a grimoire) his family has guarded for centuries has gone missing – and so has his entire family. He and his friend, Gabriel Auclair, have been searching for information, knowing that whichever side has possession of the grimoire doesn’t matter because the type of magic it contains would ensure destruction on a massive scale, and no government can be trusted with its secrets. Elliot isn’t pleased to have been lied to about D’Aramitz; his orders are to return the rescued prisoner to the French authorities, but other motivations are clearly in play and he’s not about to hand over a man who has been held prisoner and interrogated by the Germans to people who are likely to do the same thing! To the best of his knowledge, they’ve rescued allied soldiers – not deserters – and he turns a blind eye when D’Aramitz and Auclair leave.
Their new commanding officer isn’t best pleased when he learns that the two Frenchmen have gone, but there’s no time to dwell on it – he has a new mission for Elliot and his team, one in which they will work with another small group of skilled soldiers. Elliot will be in overall command, but he’s dismayed to learn that the other team’s commanding officer is Captain Everett Astor, someone he’d once been in love with. As a boy, Elliot had become deeply infatuated with the slightly older Astor, ignoring various red flags over the years until, when Elliot was eighteen, Astor finally revealed himself to be a vindictive, manipulative bastard who never loved Elliot at all. And now, Elliot is being ordered to entrust the safety of his team to a man he knows to be an egotistical lying prick whose skill – he can skim a person’s thoughts with a simple touch – could make them all vulnerable to his spite and ambition. But the biggest challenge is going to be keeping his relationship with Sully under wraps because he knows that Sully’s instinct to protect him from the barbs and comments he knows Astor will be throwing his way will almost certainly give them away. Warning the team to be careful around Astor is tricky – having to work with someone Elliot feels they can’t trust is hardly likely to bolster their morale – but orders are orders. Their mission is to cross into Belgium in order to track down more of the vials of necromantic gas like the ones they’d retreived from the German labs last winter so they can be studied further.
You can read the rest of this review at All About Romance .