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Sacrifices
Love Beyond Eros follows a man whose disappearance from a remote Greek village, following a painful turning point in his relationship, quickly becomes a dangerous life-or-death mystery. What is the most challenging aspect of writing a series?
Apart from trying to keep the reader attracted by mixing action, drama, and humour, for me the most challenging aspect was to keep the characters’ arcs real and growing. The series has multiple secondary main characters which are vital to the story, but also a large number of other characters which had to fit the story whilst, in a short time, showing their own traits and character arc growth. Even more challenging was the fact that the main character and the secondary main characters were based on real-life cases because I had to fictionalise aspects to hide their true identity, and I had to balance real-life events with fictionalised events.
The story suggests that love can require difficult choices and personal sacrifice. Do you believe sacrifice is an essential part of deep love?
In the normal day-to-day discussions or conversations, I agree with the statement that love requires sacrifices from both parties. However, in the non-discussional but very real world, those who find true love do not consider giving up something or giving priority to the other partner a sacrifice. When real love is present, there is no longer an ego. There is pure psychic fulfilment, which becomes an inner pleasure to prioritise giving rather than taking.
How do you decide when a story needs another twist or complication?
In my case, I wrote the story before knowing how to write a story. I wanted to pass the message again through my experience as a Hypno-Psychoanalyst, which proved case after case that sex is not the main or only ailment of psychological problems, as Sigmund Freud proposes. Case after case, the main ailment was love, even the misconception of love. Love within erotic partners, love within a family, parents, siblings, friends, and so on. Therefore, I had to keep the story interesting whilst passing real messages.
After writing the story, I had to learn how to write a story by studying the fathers of storytelling from Aristoteles to MaGee and other contemporary teachers. Luckily, I was within 80% of the correct storytelling architecture. But I had to go back and rewrite.
How I decided if the story needed another twist is that I imagine the story as the architect’s plan, which needs to be followed by a builder to construct a house or a building. Each room needs a door. So each section of the story has to have its own room with its own door. I looked to make sure each section of the story moved the story forward whilst completing its own mini architectural plan whilst simultaneously being a necessary part of the story. If not, I had to rewrite or introduce another twist or complication first to make it interesting for the reader to continue reading and second to make sure it fitted in the story whilst moving the story forward.
Therefore, a combination of factors: keep it interesting for the reader, make sure it is part of the architecture, and no sections missing, and be the step forward to the next section of the story.
What is one thing about Love Beyond Eros that you think might surprise readers?
That indeed there is such a level of true love very few believe exists these days.
If you were to ask me for more than one important thing that will surprise readers, I would say that whoever reads the trilogy will gain some level of love therapy. In fact, every time they read, they will gain more love therapy. Readers will heal many love-related psychological ailments that may affect them on a subconscious level.
Despite being a fiction story, the messages passed are real, based on real clinical cases.
The love secret is real, but the beauty of love is to be found without using the love secret.
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In his final quest, simultaneously finding love beyond eros, and the Love Secret, Aris and Angelica have to endure immense pain and sacrifices. Having succumbed to the power of forbidden love, will they endure the physical and psychological tortures awaiting them?
Love Beyond Eros
Love Beyond Eros, the third book in Chris Neo’s The Love Secret series, is an ambitious mix of romantic drama, psychological exploration, family story, and high-stakes adventure. The novel begins with Aris missing from the remote Greek village where his relationship with Angelica has reached a painful turning point, then quickly turns his disappearance into a life-or-death crisis. From there, the story keeps expanding, bringing friends, family members, military figures, enemies, and former lovers into an increasingly elaborate chain of events. That scope fits Neo’s stated purpose for the series: he wants an emotionally driven story that explores love and relationships while keeping the plot moving quickly. What makes the book distinctive is how fully it commits to that combination. Love here isn’t simply romantic attraction. It becomes the force behind friendship, loyalty, sacrifice, jealousy, forgiveness, parenthood, and the difficult choices people make when someone they care about is in danger.
The emotional center of the novel is Aris, but the story works through a large ensemble, and several of the most interesting developments happen because other characters are forced to reconsider who they are. Angelica’s devotion to Aris becomes fierce and protective. John and Uri discover that friendship means showing up even when they’re frightened, inconvenienced, or powerless to fix the situation. Varo has one of the book’s largest arcs, moving through obsession, suspicion, buried trauma, loyalty, and a growing understanding of her own past. Granny, Zoe, Gina, Adonis, and others each contribute another variation on the book’s central question: what does loving someone actually require of you? The title gradually earns its importance because the novel keeps pushing beyond eros, or romantic desire, toward agape, family bonds, friendship, compassion, and self-sacrifice. Angelica eventually gives that idea its clearest expression when she describes a love that reaches beyond eros, tying the title directly to the emotional argument the story has been building.
Neo tells all of this in a deliberately heightened style. The book moves from a Greek village and a mysterious poisoning into military flights, international maneuvering, assassins, rescues, betrayals, martial arts confrontations, family reunions, pregnancies, old romances, and long-delayed revelations. It has the energy of a serialized adventure, with short chapters and frequent shifts in location and perspective designed to keep another complication arriving just as the previous one settles. That can make the experience feel almost breathless, but it also gives the novel its personality. Serious conversations about love and identity can sit beside broad comedy, sensual scenes, action sequences, and larger-than-life characters without the story losing its basic emotional direction. By the final chapter and epilogue, the sprawling cast has been drawn back toward family, healing, changed relationships, and the possibility of another journey, giving the ending the feeling of both a conclusion and a continuation.
I’d recommend Love Beyond Eros most strongly to readers who enjoy emotionally intense stories that combine romance with adventure, family drama, friendship, danger, and questions about why people love the way they do. It should especially appeal to readers who like big casts, dramatic reversals, passionate dialogue, Greek cultural touches, and characters whose emotional growth matters as much as the physical action surrounding them. Since this is Book Three, it will have the greatest impact on readers who already know Aris, John, Uri, Varo, Angelica, and the relationships developed earlier in The Love Secret series. The novel asks for a reader willing to enter its heightened world and care about its characters with the same intensity that they care about one another. For that reader, this is a generous, eventful finale built around a sincere idea: desire may begin a love story, but loyalty, sacrifice, forgiveness, friendship, and family are what reveal how deep love can become.
Pages: 416 | ASIN : B0CXB6NQTL
Beyond Eros
Chris Neo’s Beyond Eros, the first installment in The Love Secret Series, is an ambitious blend of relationship drama, psychological inquiry, family saga, comedy, and international adventure. The novel begins with Aris as a fearless and inquisitive boy in Cyprus, where his fascination with a girl named Gina leads him to hear of a mysterious secret capable of inspiring love. That childhood question becomes the organizing idea of his life. Decades later, Aris is a successful businessman, husband, father, and grandfather whose marriage to Gina has deteriorated into resentment and distrust. When the strain of his home life finally pushes him to leave, his old curiosity about the Love Secret becomes a reason to travel and, more importantly, a way to reconsider what love actually means. Neo describes the series as fiction drawn partly from true-love stories and clinical experience, woven into a fictional adventure, and that combination is evident throughout the novel.
Aris is the force that holds the sprawling narrative together. The qualities established in his childhood, including courage, stubbornness, humor, loyalty, impulsiveness, and an almost compulsive need to confront injustice, remain recognizable in the older man. His consistency gives the novel continuity even as its settings and genres change. Aris can move from arguing about marriage and fidelity to fighting criminals, escaping military detention, navigating foreign countries, or debating the nature of love with his companions, yet he remains unmistakably the same character. His relationships also expose different parts of him. Gina brings his ideas about marital loyalty into conflict with years of bitterness and betrayal. Varo Chase introduces a dangerous form of obsession that mixes attraction, power, surveillance, and control. John and Uri turn philosophical arguments about love, sex, friendship, and commitment into an ongoing conversation. The women Aris encounters during his travels further complicate his self-image as a loyal, one-woman man, forcing him to examine the difference between desire, companionship, devotion, and romantic love.
The novel’s most distinctive quality is its determination to make ideas about love part of the action. Characters repeatedly argue competing definitions of love, and those arguments are tested by marriages, affairs, friendships, family bonds, sexual relationships, jealousy, sacrifice, and betrayal. Neo doesn’t reduce the subject to romance. The book is equally interested in parental love, loyalty between friends, self-interest, erotic attraction, and the possibility that people can sincerely love someone while still causing that person harm. By the final stages of his journey, Aris has become considerably less certain than the boy who believed a secret could simply make another person love him. His weary conclusion that “Love is a puzzle no one will ever solve” captures a major development in his thinking. The novel’s psychological dimension comes from this gradual dismantling of Aris’s certainty. He searches for a formula but repeatedly encounters people whose motives and emotions resist formulas.
Beyond Eros is expansive and deliberately eventful. Its early Cyprus chapters establish Aris’s family values, his resistance to authority, and the origins of his fascination with the Love Secret. The contemporary sections broaden into marital drama and corporate intrigue before the book becomes an increasingly elaborate travel adventure through Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and beyond. Neo relies heavily on dialogue, confrontations, physical action, comic reversals, and cliffhanger situations, an approach the author explicitly identifies in his note to the reader as central to his storytelling style. The accumulation of fights, escapes, seductions, arguments, conspiracies, and near-death encounters gives the novel a deliberately heightened quality. Some episodes stretch plausibility, but they also reinforce the almost mythic construction of Aris as a modern adventurer pursuing an ancient mystery. The humor, particularly in the exchanges among Aris, John, and Uri, helps connect the philosophical discussions to the more extravagant action sequences.
Beyond Eros is a novel about a man searching outward for an answer that continually sends him back toward the relationships that formed him. The Love Secret provides the mystery, but Aris’s changing understanding of loyalty, friendship, sexuality, betrayal, and family provides the book’s emotional progression. His journey doesn’t end with a neat solution. It leaves him with clues, unfinished destinations, unresolved relationships, and a more complicated understanding of himself, which I think is fitting for the opening volume of a series.
Pages: 399 | ASIN : B0BKLLYZQ6
Between Eros
When I first picked up Chris Neo’s Between Eros, I thought I was stepping into a straightforward love story, but it opened up into something bigger. The book follows Aris, an older, seasoned man juggling a collapsing marriage, unpredictable friendships, and a dangerous ocean voyage that turns into a survival fight. What begins as a romantic adventure quickly spirals into storms, sabotage, and tangled emotional loyalties. The story blends romance, action, and psychological tension, giving it the feel of romantic adventure fiction tinged with thriller energy.
As I read, I found myself reacting as if I were listening to a friend tell me wild stories over coffee, pausing every so often to say, “Wait… what?” The writing leans into momentum rather than subtlety. Neo moves quickly through conflict, argument, seduction, and danger, rarely lingering on inner reflection. The fast pace kept me turning pages. I didn’t expect the mix of interpersonal drama and near disasters at sea to feel as chaotic as it did, but it fits the book’s emotional landscape. Aris is constantly pulled between desire, responsibility, ego, and fear, and the writing mirrors that turbulence.
Aris is written as both admirable and deeply flawed, and the women around him range from seductive to volatile to tender. The tone sometimes slides into melodrama, but in a way that feels intentional for the genre. What stood out most to me were the moments when characters dropped their masks. A single line of vulnerability from Kay, or a burst of insecurity from Uri, did more for me than some of the larger plot swings. The book seems to ask whether love is a force of destiny, a psychological illusion, or something we build through trial, error, and sheer stubbornness. It doesn’t hand you a tidy answer.
By the time I closed the book, I had the sense that Between Eros would appeal most to readers who enjoy high drama, fast movement, and a blend of romance and danger. If you like romantic adventure fiction that leans into passion, betrayal, big emotions, and bigger twists, this one delivers exactly that. It is bold, emotive, and unafraid to swing for the fences.
Pages: 390 | ASIN : B0D6BTYFNZ
