An entertaining and often playful magical romance set in a dangerous world.
A demon and a fairy find a complicated connection in Crowne’s debut erotic fantasy-series starter.
This novel posits a world shared by humans and several other supernatural cultures. Fairies are known for their stimulating magical touch and for their blood, which others turned into a recreational drug called Dust. Vera, a 21-year-old captive fairy, is auctioned off, along with her fairy pals Rob and Lydia, to the demon Prince Leo Vronsky—an inventor with chiseled abs, black wings, and silvery eyes. The trio’s initial anxiety is allayed when Leo frees them and enlists him in his project of finding a synthetic version of Dust, which he hopes will lead to the abolition of fairy slavery by undercutting the market for their blood products. Helped by his sarcastic, gay cousin Rand and shy human assistant Marcus, Leo finds that Vera’s blood is so potent that contact with it gives him an enormous boost of power and speed, along with heightened sexual desire that Vera enthusiastically requites. Further adventures—including sparring exercises and an expedition to capture wild fairies and protect them from evil human hunters—furnish pretexts for Leo and Vera to get together, with Vera’s magic getting them hot and bothered. Alas, their love faces obstacles, including the machinations of Leo’s father, the king of the demons. Crowne’s yarn, the first in her Sins of the Blood War series, creates a teeming fantasy world. She also limns the BDSM-tinged relationship between the two main characters in evocative, atmospheric prose: “His bright blue eyes seemed to sparkle as if he knew a joke we didn’t.” Vera and Leo’s banter has a feisty, energetic friction—Leo: “You’ve been here one day, and you ate my muffins.” Vera: “Your name wasn’t on them’ ”—that eventually works up to some real erotic heat.
An entertaining and often playful magical romance set in a dangerous world.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 291
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road meets Chaucer's Canterbury Tales in this frightful medieval epic about an orphan girl with visionary powers in plague-devastated France.
The year is 1348. The conflict between France and England is nothing compared to the all-out war building between good angels and fallen ones for control of heaven (though a scene in which soldiers are massacred by a rainbow of arrows is pretty horrific). Among mortals, only the girl, Delphine, knows of the cataclysm to come. Angels speak to her, issuing warnings—and a command to run. A pack of thieves is about to carry her off and rape her when she is saved by a disgraced knight, Thomas, with whom she teams on a march across the parched landscape. Survivors desperate for food have made donkey a delicacy and don't mind eating human flesh. The few healthy people left lock themselves in, not wanting to risk contact with strangers, no matter how dire the strangers' needs. To venture out at night is suicidal: Horrific forces swirl about, ravaging living forms. Lethal black clouds, tentacled water creatures and assorted monsters are comfortable in the daylight hours as well. The knight and a third fellow journeyer, a priest, have difficulty believing Delphine's visions are real, but with oblivion lurking in every shadow, they don't have any choice but to trust her. The question becomes, can she trust herself? Buehlman, who drew upon his love of Fitzgerald and Hemingway in his acclaimed Southern horror novel, Those Across the River (2011), slips effortlessly into a different kind of literary sensibility, one that doesn't scrimp on earthy humor and lyrical writing in the face of unspeakable horrors. The power of suggestion is the author's strong suit, along with first-rate storytelling talent.
An author to watch, Buehlman is now two for two in delivering eerie, offbeat novels with admirable literary skill.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-937007-86-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ace/Berkley
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.
Childhood friends, almost-sweethearts, a misunderstanding, and a funeral.
Blair Lang and Declan Renshaw were best friends who went on one date before a disagreement and an accident sent them in different directions after high school. Now Blair is back from college to be with her great-aunt Lottie, who’s dying, and to support her single mother in small-town Seabrook, California. Finding a job at a coffee shop puts her in the path of her former boyfriend, since he turns out to be its owner. Can the two get past their mistakes? The novel uses the popular second-chance romance trope, but Pham fails to energize it through interesting characters. Blair’s grief over her great-aunt’s death and her plan to help her mother are overshadowed by internal monologues about her feelings, the way her friends aren’t paying attention to her, and the novel she plans to write. Declan’s distinguishing characteristic, besides being a former high school quarterback, is his skill at building birdhouses. Unsurprisingly, the couple doesn’t have much chemistry; when they embrace, their “bodies meld like…memory foam.” The wooden characters, unusual word choices (“conglomerate of pedestrians,” “litany of plants”), and odd turns of phrase (“tension melting from his eyebrows like butter melting in a warm pan”) are almost enough to obscure the lack of plot development. What passes for stakes is easily defused when Blair comes into an inheritance that saves her from working as a consultant at Ernst & Young in New York—so she can write a romance novel.
A romance that could have used significant rethinking.Pub Date: March 3, 2026
ISBN: 9781668095188
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
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