Before we begin I want to let you know that this review will include spoilers. There’s almost no way to talk about this book without spoiling the ending, which impacts the entire novel. Readers, proceed with caution.

More often than not I enjoy going into novels relatively unaware of the major plot points. For this novel, I did actually read the synopsis on the back, which threw me off completely. I was under the impression that this would be a dark, taboo romance between a widow and a man in prison. I was wholly unprepared to encounter scenes that left me spooked, and feeling like I had unwittingly fallen into a thriller of some sort. 

Our FMC opens the novel at a funeral, wondering how her life will move forward now that her husband is gone. She begins receiving letters from a man in prison, who insists he knows her. She entertains these letters as a way to communicate with someone other than her house keeper, and the repairmen who flock in and out of her old fixer upper of a house.

When the roofer was introduced I knew immediately he was being set up to be our leading man, but I couldn’t figure out how? Was he the man from prison? How was he still writing her letters postmarked from the prison, and sneaking them into her house unseen? Then I wondered if we were dealing with a dark romance that included fantasy elements. There were clues here and there that I was, at times, too obtuse to connect the more logical dots. 

When our MC asks our FMC if her husband had ever beat her, because of her bruises, and she notices a bruise on her arm in her wedding photo, I thought to myself, I’ve cracked it. The pen pal is a demon who has been haunting her her entire life. This demon killed her husband, and is now going to try and make her fall in love with him through this nice roofer guy persona. That would explain all the weird, ghost-like phenomena happening in and around her home. 

Well, I was close. But that’s definitely not what was going on. Before the big reveal we get to watch our FMC and MMC fall in love. Very spicy, kinky, master and pet love, but love nonetheless. I wasn’t a huge fan of the naive way the FMC was written. Some of the language used to describe these sexy encounters grated on my nerves, but that’s a personal annoyance. I really enjoyed the exploration into kink between this couple, and watching them explore this relationship while hiding so much of their past from one another.

I won’t lie, I was scared and frustrated. I was one page away from figuring it out, from the talk between the FMC and her housekeeper where they discuss ghosts and what keeps them from moving on, and how you can’t tell a ghost they’re dead, when I flipped to the last chapter of the book. If I had just kept reading I would have figured it out on the next page, but I had to know if our FMC and MMC made it to the end of the novel in one piece.

Turns out, her husband had killed them both. Before the novel even began. It’s basically the Nicole Kidman ghost movie (The Others) but with spice and romance thrown into the mix. I was shocked. Flummoxed. My flabber was truly gasted. She’d been dead this whole time?! And so was he! I sped through the rest of this novel, reading the entire book in one sitting. My eyes blurred together from fatigue as I read the final chapters. As I sobbed watching these two people who had finally found their happily ever afters have their lives cut short by domestic violence. This part of the novel was extremely traumatizing and triggering to read. I honestly couldn’t emotionally process what I had read until I did my video review of the book a few days later and couldn’t stop sobbing through the entire review.

 

What I thought would be a fun, spicy dark romance, was a haunting, dark, sexy and heartbreaking story of domestic violence at its worst. I could not believe the turn this book took, especially when I thought from the beginning we were just getting a spicy pen pal, taboo romance story. No wonder I’ve never heard anyone talk about the actual plot of this book. There’s no way you can without completely ruining the shocking twist that alters the entire story.

 

 

I can’t tell you if I loved it or hated it. I loved the chemistry between this couple. I loved how creatively this was written, despite having seen a movie with almost the exact same plot a decade ago (the movie came out in 2001 but I probably saw it when I was in college around 2013). I hate that they died so violently. I hate that her abusive husband killed the only man who had made her feel safe and loved right in front of her. And I hate that this could so easily not be a fictional story, but a headline on the nine o’clock news report. I loved these characters, and hated how short their time together was. I guess I loved that even in death, they found their way back to one another.