Even Serial Killers Deserve a Meet Cute

That is the line on the cover, and it tells you within nine words whether this book is for you.

Sloane Sutherland and Rowan Kane both kill people. Specifically, they kill people who kill people, which is the moral arrangement the book asks you to accept in exchange for two hundred pages of banter. They meet over a mutual target, discover they have the same hobby and the same sense of humour about it, and settle into an annual competition: one designated monster, two hunters, first one to find him wins.

Four years of that before either of them admits to anything.

This should not work. A romantic comedy about serial killers is a premise that collapses the moment either register wavers, and Brynne Weaver's solution is to refuse to waver at all. The jokes are genuinely funny. The violence is genuinely appalling. She does not soften one to make room for the other, and the whiplash is the entire reading experience.

What It's About

The competition is the structure. Each year they select a target, each year they race, and each year the loser owes the winner something. It gives Weaver a repeating shape to hang four years of slow burn on, and it lets her skip forward through time without the relationship feeling rushed.

Rowan is a chef. Sloane calls him Butcher. He calls her Blackbird. Their friendship is built on an easy, constant, extremely rude conversation that neither of them has with anyone else, because nobody else knows what they are.

Underneath it, both of them are carrying something. Sloane's reason for doing this is not a hobby and never was. Rowan's family is more involved than he lets on. And the people they have left behind over the years are not as far behind as they assumed.

Dual point of view, and a genuine happy ending.

What Works

The banter is the best in the subgenre. Weaver writes two people who are funny in the same specific way, which is much harder than writing one funny character. Their conversations feel like something overheard rather than something constructed, and it is why readers who have no interest in serial killer fiction keep recommending this book anyway.

The four year structure earns the romance. Most dark romance compresses everything into weeks. Here, two people spend four years deliberately not saying the thing, and by the time either of them cracks, the reader has been waiting long enough to feel it.

Rowan is not a brooding wall. He is warm, chatty, domestic, and cooks constantly. Dark romance heroes are almost never allowed to be this likeable, and the contrast with what he actually does for a living is the joke the whole book runs on.

And the violence is not decorative. Weaver writes the kills in detail, and the detail is not there to be edgy. It is there because she is not letting the reader enjoy the comedy without also looking at what these two people are.

Where It Struggles

The tonal juggling will lose some readers, and that is a legitimate reaction. The book moves from a genuinely funny exchange to graphic torture within a page, repeatedly. If you need one register to prepare you for the other, this will feel like being shaken.

The moral arrangement is thinner than the book pretends. Sloane and Rowan only kill people who deserve it, which is a premise the narrative never seriously tests. A book this willing to look at gore is oddly unwilling to look at what happens when they get it wrong.

The second half tightens into thriller plotting that is competent but less distinctive than the first half's structure. Once the external threat arrives, the annual competition shape disappears, and with it the thing that made the book unusual.

And the pacing of the final act rushes. Several threads resolve quickly and somewhat conveniently.

The Velvet Coven Verdict

Butcher and Blackbird is one of the funniest books in this coven to date, and one of the most violent. Holding those two facts at once is the point, and Brynne Weaver does it with more control than the premise suggests is possible.

H.D. Carlton, who wrote Haunting Adeline, called it hilarious, heartwarming, sexy and gory. That is an accurate list and an unusual one, and it is worth noting that the author of one of the darkest books on this site chose the word heartwarming.

If your dark romance has been getting bleaker and you want something that still has teeth but also has jokes, this is the correction. Two more books follow, Leather & Lark and Scythe & Sparrow, both interconnected standalones about the surrounding cast.

Come for the meet cute. Read the content warnings first.

Content note: Graphic violence and torture described in detail, gore, cannibalism, murder, child abuse in backstory, explicit sexual content. This is a comedy and it is also one of the most violent books in the coven.

Quick Reference

  • Author: Brynne Weaver
  • Published: 2023 (Zando)
  • Series: The Ruinous Love Trilogy, Book 1
  • Pages: 368
  • Setting: Across the United States
  • Tropes: Friends to lovers, slow burn, dual POV, morally grey, dark comedy, found family
  • Spice level: 5/5. Explicit, frequent
  • Status: BookTok phenomenon, trilogy complete