Pestilence

The review

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have arrived, and Pestilence is riding toward Sara Burn's town to end it. She shoots him off his horse. That does not kill him, because he cannot die, but it does make him very interested in the woman who tried. He takes her prisoner, and the two of them set out across a dying world together. It is the apocalyptic enemies-to-lovers road trip that turned a self-published series into a BookTok staple.

The setup is bleak and the tone is not. Sara is funny, stubborn and sarcastic in the face of a literal plague god, and a huge part of the book's charm is her voice narrating the end of the world like a long, bad camping trip. Pestilence begins as a cold, otherworldly being who thinks humans are vermin, and the slow shift in how he sees her, and through her the rest of humanity, is the real arc.

Thalassa does not soften the premise. People die everywhere the horseman goes, and Sara has to live with the fact that she is traveling with the cause. That moral weight makes the romance more interesting than a standard captor fantasy, and it gives the ending real stakes.

The heat: four peppers. It is a slow burn, so the first half runs on tension, but once the door opens the scenes are explicit, and the hero's inexperience is a big part of the appeal. Early on the captive dynamic and his cruelty mean consent is shaky in the wider relationship, though not in the on-page intimacy.

Know before you start: it is book one of four, each following a different horseman and a different heroine, so it reads as a standalone with a happy ending. Expect violence and death on a mass scale. If you like monster romance but want a hero who is more god than beast, this is the gateway. War, the second book, is the series favorite for many readers.