By far, this book is the craziest and goriest I have ever read. At times, I was squealing and crinkling my toes during the disgusting – yet enjoyable – scenes I had to read. 

‘Butcher & Blackbird’ by Brynne Weaver is about a woman named Sloane, who is known as Blackbird, who is a serial killer…who kills serial killers. I love the moral dilemma that goes through the readers’ mind. Is it wrong what she does? Sloane is saving peoples’ lives, but she’s also taking lives too.

Sloane meets a guy named Rowan, also known as the “Boston Butcher”, who is also a serial killing psychopath, and they have this annual competition where they find a target and see who can kill them first. It is this twisted game that they both love and look forward to every year. Sloane has a reputation of killing her victims by plucking their eyeballs out of their sockets. The description Weaver uses here is where I say I was squeamish.

The first night they meet, they happened to be after the same killer, but Sloane got to him first. She is locked in a cage and Rowan lets her out; he calls her a “blackbird in a cage.”

My main issue with this book is the romance. Sloane and Rowan live in two different states and only see each other once a year. At times they go a few years without speaking. Rowan has an obsessive connection to Sloane because she is the only person who understands him and vice versa. 

Once they become romantically involved, the sex seems like it is pretty much the entire plot. Scene after scene with nothing other than that, it gets a bit annoying. I prefer romance to be the sub-plot of a bigger and more complex story. It drives the passion and emotion of the characters to where the romance doesn’t feel as forced. 

I try to understand that this book is different than other romances because Sloane and Rowan are not normal people. They are killers. The obsessiveness makes sense because of who they are. 

For example, my favorite scene is the first kill. They are given a location by Rowan’s brother Lachlan, and they try to find out who they are after. They stay at an inn in West Virginia. Sloane and Rowan are given connecting rooms, and while Sloane is changing, Rowan hears movement coming from behind a painting. There he discovers the innkeeper, Francis, peeping in on Sloane. He runs away and the two of them go after him. 

Rowan goes to Francis’ house and is so angry for what he was doing. This is where we see the Butcher side of him. Francis tries to leave in his car and Rowan jumps on top of the hood, smashes the windshield with a rock, reaches through the broken window, grabs the wheel to pull the car over, ends up crashing the car into a tree, then beats Francis to death. Rowan fears he scared Sloane away after she witnessed this when he calls out and she doesn’t answer, but she didn’t leave. 

Aside from the killing, Rowan owns a restaurant in Boston, he then opens another location called “Butcher & Blackbird.” The location name is cute and ties into the plot, but their wedding at the end feels heavily rushed. Wedding endings never fail to feel tacky and cheesy.

Rowan has two other brothers, Lachlan and Fionn, who each have their own book in this trilogy. The sequel, “Leather & Lark” is Lachlan’s book and the third one, “Scythe & Sparrow” is Fionn’s.

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