Audiobook length: 8 hrs 43 mins
Rating: 5 stars
CBR16 Sweet Books: Excited (I love this book and would like everyone I know to read it, but also understand that it's very much NOT for everyone).
Spoiler warning! I will do my best to review this without major plot spoilers, but if you want to experience this book without any prior knowledge of the contents, possibly skip this review until you've read the book.
Sloane "Blackbird" Sutherland and Rowan "Butcher" Kane have a rather unusual meet cute. He finds her locked in a cage, starved and desperate, and a decomposing corpse on the floor just outside the cage door. Sloane and Rowan are both serial killers, but only murder other killers. Obviously, they don't meet a lot of people who share their unusual hobby, and once they establish that they know of each other's reputations, end up having lunch and agreeing to a friendly competition. Once a year, they'll meet up to hunt the same killer. The first to five kills gets the honour of killing a particularly infamous one.
Rowan is smitten with Sloane from their very first meeting, and Sloane certainly finds Rowan attractive. She's just so shy, paranoid, and socially awkward that she cannot imagine what a handsome, charming, outgoing, and flirtatious man like him might see in her. So they develop a friendship, which clearly starts developing into more with each meeting, but it takes more than four years before Sloane actually dares believe that Rowan likes her as more than just a like-minded friend. Can the two of them, restless, dark-souled, murderous, and obsessive, actually make a relationship work? And will they survive long enough to enjoy a HEA? It's not like their recreational activities are risk-free.
There is a LONG list of trigger warnings at the very start of this book. If you find eyeballs and the removal of them unpleasant, then this book is probably not for you. These people are murderers, and there are graphic depictions of both a violent and sexual nature (there's a lot of mutual pining until about 60% into the book, and then they really make up for lost time and things get very 18+ afterwards). I tend to find suspense novels stressful, I don't really like horror. I never understood the fascination a lot of people have with True Crime. This book is basically what you'd get if Hannibal had a baby with a snarky romantic comedy. It's adorable, laugh-out-loud funny, very romantic, extremely spicy, and very very gross in parts. Both protagonists kill without remorse, and experience some pretty dangerous situations over the course of their strange murder quests. Yet I absolutely adored this book.
Sloane is so shy, dorky, and socially awkward. She literally has one friend in the entire world, no siblings, and doesn't seem to talk or interact much with her parents. Since she seems to be bad with people in general, it's no wonder that she's intimidated and a bit confused by Rowan at first. He's outgoing, gregarious, charming, and very good-looking. He seems to flirt with everyone, so for a while, it's understandable that Sloane doesn't clue into the fact that he's clearly completely obsessed with her.
I was completely hooked by this almost instantly. I bought the audiobook in an Audible sale in early January and thought it might be a fun and unusual read for Valentine's Day this year. I started listening in the morning on my way to work and stayed up late so I could actually finish the audiobook the same day. While I don't have as much time as I used to just for reading, I do occasionally finish a book in a day. But I can't remember the last time I finished a whole audiobook the very same day I started it, even listening at x1.5 speed.
I had a major book hangover and kept thinking so much about the book and the characters that I had to just start the audiobook all over again. That level of obsession only happens every few years for me, and should tell you something about how much I loved this book. The list of content warnings for this book is on the author's website, so if any of these seem like dealbreakers to you, it's probably best to skip it. On the other hand, I also have two friends who were disappointed that the book didn't go enough into detail about the planning and actual murdering, so that's also worth bearing in mind.
Judging a book by its cover: The neon pink and purple against the black background is eye-catching even before you see the details, like the chainsaw, cleaver, axe, and obviously all the bones. It's sort of cute and sinister at the same time, which pretty much perfectly sums up this book.
Crossposted on Cannonball Read
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