CBR17 Book 16: "Scythe & Sparrow" by Brynne Weaver

Page count: 416 pages

Audio book length: 11 hrs 36 mins

Rating: 4 stars

Buzzword Cover Challenge 25: Transportation

Doctor Fionn Kane is doing just fine in the little Nebraska town he retreated to after leaving his promising surgical career and ex-fiancee behind. He doesn't really want anything to do with the past-times of either of his brothers and is keeping his head down, running and working out when he's not working in his small medical clinic or the hospital. He also crochets. Then a beautiful woman with a severe leg injury ends up nearly unconscious on the floor of his clinic, asking him for help before she passes out. Fionn doesn't realise that despite his attempts to live a calm and uneventful life, chaos has just found him.

Rose Evans has worked at Silveria Circus for over a decade. She has a fortune telling booth, reading tarot cards for paying customers, and also rides her motorcycle every evening in death-defying stunts. She's also has a very particular interest in botany, and as the Sparrow, she has provided many a woman with the means to incapacitate or kill an abusive partner. Normally, she doesn't do any of the killing herself, but when an obviously terrified woman comes to her for a reading, and Rose is able to figure out where the family lives, she decides to take matters (and a baseball bat) into her own hands, to rid the family of their abusive husband/father. Except Rose seriously underestimates the rage and strength of the man she attacks, and ends up with a badly broken leg before she manages to jam some cocktail sticks in the guy's eye, giving her enough time to escape on her motorcycle. She locates the local clinic, desperate to find something for the pain, and passes out shortly after the handsome doctor finds her.

A circus performer with a broken leg can't do her job, so the travelling circus leaves Rose and her RV in Nebraska, planning to pick her up once she's had time to heal. On crutches, after the complicated break, Rose isn't able to mount the stairs to her RV. Fionn has a spare room in his house and surprises himself by inviting the intriguing woman to stay with him until she's had time to recover. Fionn is used to depriving himself of the things he truly desires, so staying away from Rose, his patient, should be fine, right?

Readers of the rest of Brynne Weaver's Ruinous Love trilogy, will have already met Fionn and Rose in Butcher & Blackbird (when Ronan and Sloane show up unexpectedly requiring medical help they can't really get from a hospital) and in Leather & Lark, where the final events left things looking pretty critical for Rose (spoiler: she doesn't die). Plot-wise, the events of this book start a while before Ronan and Sloane show up, and continues as a sequel to both previous books, so the readers can discover how Rose is pulled back from death's door. 

Having read the previous two books, I felt like I already had an idea of who Fionn and Rose were as characters, but it was nevertheless fun to see them more deeply developed. The reveal that Fionn crochets in his spare time, along with a bunch of small-town grannies was a very fun one. Unlike his brothers, Fionn has chosen to heal people rather than to unalive them, but he still feels immense guilt for the role he played in the demise of their abusive father, and has never felt able to confide in his brothers about this. Rose, on the other hand, seems to have quite a death toll that she facilitated by giving other women the means to be free of their abusers. It's only in this book that she decides to try to take a more active hand in murdering violent and unpleasant men, and because she is very impulsive, it rarely goes the way she plans. Poor Fionn has to get her out of trouble more than once. 

Rating the books of the trilogy, Leather & Lark is my least favourite, while Butcher & Blackbird remains my absolute favourite (none of the other books have made me that obsessed), putting Scythe & Sparrow firmly in the middle. Of the three, this is probably the book with the most mutual pining (while Ronan pines for years for Sloane, she's pretty oblivious to all of it), and our protagonists are very attracted to one another from the start, but not willing, or in some cases able, to act on it. In the last third of this book, Fionn and Rose are separated for much of it, and as a result, correspond in letters. As a result, I would probably say it's the most romantic of the three. 

This book has the same narrators as Leather & Lark and is once more a dual narration. I really like this kind of storytelling, and since the narrators also voiced Lark and Lachlan in the previous book, there is some nice continuity. 

In one of the two epilogues to this story, Ms. Weaver gives some hints towards what she's likely to be writing about next. It seems to be a spin-off of sorts from these books, and by now, I am enjoying her storytelling enough that I'll probably get the next one too.

Judging a book by its cover: I genuinely don't know why there is a scythe featured on the cover, as far as I recall, one is never used by any of the characters, protagonists or antagonists, and therefor it seems a bit unnecessary. All the other elements that we see in yellow and orange on the cover at least feature in the book at some point. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read. 

CBR16 Book 36: "Leather & Lark" by Brynne Weaver

Page count: 400 pages

Audio book length: 12 hrs 15 mins

Rating: 3.5 stars

CBR16 Bingo: Bananas

Lark Montague and Lachlan Kane have an unfortunate first meeting, when Lark during Halloween has had an "accident" and needs a car and a body fished out of a lake. Lachlan is the man forced by his employer to come help her do this. Lachlan is in scuba gear, Lark is heavily made up in a Halloween costume. Lachlan chooses to force Lark into the car of his trunk to transport her unseen away from the incident site, not realising that Lark has intense claustrophobia. She breaks out of his trunk, and runs off. Lachlan's employer is NOT impressed, and any hopes Lachlan had of escaping his violent fixer jobs go up in smoke.

The two meet again when Lark's best friend Sloane and Lachlan's younger brother Rowan celebrate their engagement. They are initially very attracted to one another, but once Lark figures out exactly where she recognises Lachlan's voice from and confronts him about their previous encounter, any sexy time feelings they felt towards the other are as dead as one of Sloane and Rowan's serial killer victims. They try not to let their dislike show too much, as the people they care most about are about to get married, but the animosity between them is palpable.

Lark's dying aunt runs a very successful, but cut-throat cupcake empire. Apparently,  someone (they suspect a business rival) is killing off some of their associates. Lark's parents suspect Lachlan is the man doing the hits, and Lark hears them threatening not only to take out Lachlan as a defensive measure but both of his brothers as well. Lark will not let anything get in the way of Sloane's happiness, and when her aunt points out that her parents won't threaten anyone considered family, she hatches a plan. She and Lachlan will have to get married, and convince her parents that they are actually in love. 

Lark promises Lachlan that she will get him free of his capricious and demanding employer if he helps her figure out who is killing her family's business associates. As it turns out, the guilty party isn't a business rival at all, but someone who wants very bad things to happen to both Lachlan and Lark. 

While not as wonderfully compelling as Butcher & Blackbird, the first book in the Ruinous Love trilogy, Leather & Lark was still a fun read (and listen), and I feel it fits into the "Bananas" square on the CBR16 Bingo card, because there is a leather working crime fixer, a cute folk singer who happens to have a side hustle murdering sexual predators, drugged cupcakes, serial killers getting married, murder victims being turned into crafts project, you name it. There is a long list of content warnings at the start of the book, although there's a lot less squicky stuff with eyeballs in this one. 

Considering I was entirely unprepared for how much I adored the first book, this book was unlikely to live up to my expectations. It was still a fun read, but I found neither Lark, nor Lachlan as charming and interesting as Rowan or dorkily insecure as Sloane (loved their cameo appearances in this book, though). Lark's aunt was a lovely supporting character, however. I had no need to immediately re-read this one, and while I might not want to revisit it in the future, I'm still very much looking forward to the third book in the series, where we get Rose and Fhion's story. 

Judging a book by its cover: I possibly like the turquoise and black better than the hot pink and black of the previous book, but the various objects representing the protagonists are less fun. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read