Butcher & Blackbird

The review

Sloane and Rowan are both serial killers who only hunt other serial killers. After a chance meeting in the middle of a job, Rowan proposes a game: once a year, each of them tracks down a monster, and whoever gets their kill first wins. Years of rivalry, road trips and murder later, the competition has turned into something neither of them planned. Butcher & Blackbird is the dark romantic comedy that made killer-on-killer romance a BookTok genre.

The tone is the surprise. The premise is violent and the body count is real, but Weaver writes it with the energy of a rom-com: banter, inside jokes, competitive pettiness and two people who are delighted to finally meet someone as strange as they are. It is horror and romance and comedy at the same time, and it should not work as well as it does.

Sloane and Rowan are both damaged, both funny and both very good at their terrible hobby. The annual hunts take them across the country, which gives the book a road-trip shape, and their slow realization that they want more than a rivalry is surprisingly tender. Rowan's brothers set up the rest of the trilogy.

The heat: four peppers. It is a slow burn for the first stretch, then the door opens with frequent, explicit scenes that match the book's appetite for chaos. It is spicy and gory at the same time, so check your tolerance for both.

Know before you start: the violence is graphic, including some genuinely gruesome kills, and the villains they hunt are the worst of the worst. We could not find a content-warning list published by the author online, so check the front of the book. It ends happily and stands alone; the Ruinous Love trilogy continues with Rowan's brothers. If you laughed through Lights Out, this is your next one.

Read it if you want dark romance that makes you laugh out loud. Skip it if gore is a hard no.