This is a spoiler-free review! Trigger warnings include violence, attempted sexual assault, murder, and gore.
I downloaded this on Stuff Your Kindle Day, and then got so overwhelmed by the fifty books that I did download that I only was reading from my physical TBR pile for most of June and July. Looking for a quick little palette cleanser before diving back into a fantasy book, this caught my eye with it's summary and novella-length. Halle and Parks are serial killers, and Parks is Halle's stalker -- how sweet!
Halle works for some type of organization called the Library, where her marks, also known as "books," are given to her. She is very into seeking justice for women who have been wronged, and does not take BS from anyone that comes her way. She reminds me a lot of Sibby from the Satan's Affair by H.D. Carlton, in the sense of her personality and her motives.
Parks, ironically, reminds me of Zade from Haunting Adeline by H.D. Carlton, even though he is obsessed with Adeline in that duet. Both are stalkers who happen upon a girl that catches their interests and are serial killers -- starting to think I have a type when it comes to dark romance. He gives Halle the nickname of "Rainbow" because of her colorful hair, but it just feels out of place for a serial killer to be giving people goofy nicknames.
The banter was cute but it started to feel like the same thing over and over again, much like the dialogue between Halle and Parks. She was always questioning him and he would just respond back that he needed to keep her safe because there were people that were after her. After a few chapters of basically the same thing happening, the story started to drag on, which I thought would be hard to do since it is under two hundred pages. Halle and Parks definitely had a spark between them, and you could tell that the chemistry was there, but it kept feeling like they would almost reach this point of infatuation with one another, and then it would fizzle away.
Now, this might be me just picking at things, but I was going to start to lose my mind if I saw one more Star Wars reference while reading this book. I have to respect the media literacy with our main female lead, but my word I was getting annoyed every time she made a reference. Also, the way that Halle and Parks spoke to each other just was not my cup of tea -- they both sounded like they wanted to have an edge to the way they spoke, but it just came off as corny to me. Especially when they would be fighting one minute and doing it the next, there was barely any build up and then the scene would be over about two pages later.
I will say that there is definitely plot development happening in this story, despite what some other reviews say -- it is most certainly not all smut, and I would say that there is actually more plot than smut in a surprising turn of events. The story actually had a lot of potential, and I feel as though if it had been longer, we would have gotten a more fleshed-out story with well-developed plot and smut scenes. I was pretty much prepared for this to be all smut and a dash of plot, and was pleasantly surprised that there was some depth to the characters and the story, even if it was not extremely deep.
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