Lights Out (Into Darkness #1)

User the.faceless.man has started following you.

Available at Amazon.com

Lights Out
Navessa Allen
Audiobook, 13+ hours
First published February 14, 2024
ISBN 9781638932239

The viral TikTok stalker dark romance, burning with high heat, hilarious banter, and a love story like you’ve never seen before. Can you handle the ride?

I want someone with a soul as black as night. Someone who would burn the world down for me and not lose a single minute of sleep over it.

Trauma nurse Alyssa Cappellucci doesn’t need any more kinks. She likes the one she’s landed on just fine. To her, nothing could top the masked men she follows online. Unless one of those men was shirtless, heavily tattooed, and waiting for her in her bedroom. She dreams about being hunted by one in particular, of him chasing her down and doing deliciously dark things to her willing body. She never could have guessed that by sending one drunken text, those dreams would become her new reality.

I want things most people don’t, craving darkness and depravity instead of light and love.

Joshua Hammond has an infamous father—the kind of man that true-crime podcasts love talking about. Josh has spent his life avoiding the limelight, but his online persona is another story. At night, he posts masked thirst traps for his millions of fans to drool over, but one follower has caught his Aly. After reading a comment begging him to break into her house wearing a mask, he decides to take her up on her offer.

Together, Aly and Josh live out their darkest fantasies, unaware that Aly has captured the attention of someone else. Someone with far more sinister intentions than a little light stalking. As Josh turns from predator to protector and the stakes heighten, he must ask himself how far he’s willing to go for the woman he’s obsessed with.

Lights Out is a fast-paced dark romance with a morally gray male lead. Some themes and scenes may be disturbing to readers. Please check the TWs at the beginning of the book.

I laughed. I blushed. I questioned the mental health of the author. And yeah, I cringed on a few occasions. 

But the one thing I could not do is predict this book. He wouldn't. Oh he would! He's not. Damn it, he is! Could not keep my jaw off the floor.

Dark, contemporary romance may not be my thing but if you're going to experience this book, do it through the audiobook because Josh is amazing and the casting for his part... Chef's kiss.

3 out of 5 stars.

Available in ebook | audiobook (highly recommend!) | paperback

Iron Flame (Empyrean #2)

My house. My chair. My woman.

Available at Amazon.com

Iron Flame
Rebecca Yarros
Empyrean, book two
623 pages, Hardcover
First published November 7, 2023
ISBN 9781649375858

Everyone expected Violet Sorrengail to die during her first year at Basgiath War College—Violet included. But Threshing was only the first impossible test meant to weed out the weak-willed, the unworthy, and the unlucky.

Now the real training begins, and Violet’s already wondering how she’ll get through. It’s not just that it’s grueling and maliciously brutal, or even that it’s designed to stretch the riders’ capacity for pain beyond endurance. It’s the new vice commandant, who’s made it his personal mission to teach Violet exactly how powerless she is–unless she betrays the man she loves.

Although Violet’s body might be weaker and frailer than everyone else’s, she still has her wits—and a will of iron. And leadership is forgetting the most important lesson Basgiath has taught her: Dragon riders make their own rules.

But a determination to survive won’t be enough this year.

Because Violet knows the real secret hidden for centuries at Basgiath War College—and nothing, not even dragon fire, may be enough to save them in the end.

4 out of 5 stars.

Available in ebook | hardcover | paperback | graphic audio 

Previously in the series:

Fourth Wing (Empyrean #1)

A dragon without its rider is a tragedy.
A rider without their dragon is dead.

Available at Amazon.com

Fourth Wing
Rebecca Yarros
Empyrean, book one
517 pages, Hardcover
Published May 2, 2023 by Entangled: Red Tower Books
ISBN 9781649374042

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders.

But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.

With fewer dragons willing to bond than cadets, most would kill Violet to better their own chances of success. The rest would kill her just for being her mother’s daughter—like Xaden Riorson, the most powerful and ruthless wingleader in the Riders Quadrant.

She’ll need every edge her wits can give her just to see the next sunrise.

Yet, with every day that passes, the war outside grows more deadly, the kingdom's protective wards are failing, and the death toll continues to rise. Even worse, Violet begins to suspect leadership is hiding a terrible secret.

Friends, enemies, lovers. Everyone at Basgiath War College has an agenda—because once you enter, there are only two ways out: graduate or die.

"I know exactly who and what you are, Violet Sorrengail."

What is she? 

I have questions. So many questions.

3.5 out of 5 stars. And those stars earned are strictly for Xaden Riorson, Tairn, Andarna, and Ridoc, because Violet... I'm not there with her yet.

Available in ebook | hardcover | paperback | graphic audiobook