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RELEASE BLITZ: Love By Design by Kate Hawthorne
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REVIEW: His Bane by Courtney W. Dixon
The District: His Bane by Courtney W. Dixon
PLEASE READ THE BLURB AND WARNINGS IF YOU’RE SENSITIVE TO TRIGGERS! And please, please be careful of spoilers and giving away endings of books. Use spoiler tags.
He is mine. I don’t care how long it takes. I will have Malik Amin.
Sullivan Beauchamp
Some people call me a monster. A psychopath. As if I care what others think. So what if I relish in the mayhem of slaughter or enjoy feeling the life blink out of someone? I am who I am. It was Malik who eventually brought me to his home and trained me to hone my skills to work under him as an assassin. Malik Amin is my equal, and he will be mine in all ways as soon as I can chip away at his ridiculous and completely unnecessary self-loathing.
Malik Amin
Sully lost everything as a teenager on my order. When I found him covered in blood four years later, I should have put him down, knowing what he was. Instead, I took him in to train him. It works for us until he wants me more than as a mentor. I cannot allow it. But if Sully is anything, he is a master at persuasiveness and discovering my weaknesses.
Reading in order will add more pleasure to the reading experience since some of the books end in a series cliffhanger. But they can technically be read as standalones.
CW: internalized homophobia of MC, murder of family, off-page molestation and rape, psychopathy, murder, torture, consensual sexual mutilation between MCs, betrayal.
His Bane is the second book of the dark assassin romance series, The District, by Courtney W. Dixon. This is a found family of queer assassins founded by Malik Amin and Sid Virgil that takes any jobs, no questions asked. The only rule is no hits on children.
Sullivan Beauchamp is the only survivor of an assassination of his family when he was 12 years old. He was put in foster care only to be sexually abused by his foster father. When the abusive asshole killed Sully’s favorite foster brother, Sully took immense pleasure in ending the bastard. While on the run, he was tracked down by Malik and taken under the older man’s wing.
Malik has been monitoring Sully since he went in foster care, but not close enough to know about his home life. Noticing the teen’s psychopathy and his potential, he offered the 16-year-old board, lodging, and training. He might have gotten more than he had bargained for because Sully kept pushing his buttons and pursued the older man with the kind of obsessive-possessive determination only psychopaths possess.
I loved Sully from the get-go! With so many bad things done to him at a young age, from his cold, harsh father to the abusive foster parent, Sully learned to rely on his instincts and intellect, harnessing his rage as a physical force to defeat bullies and bad guys. His favorite weapon is his 25,000$ knife gifted to him by Malik. His favorite music genre is disco.
Sully is immensely self-aware, constantly evaluating himself and learning about emotions and relationships so he can give Malik what he needs. He doesn’t expect other people to understand him. But far from angsting about it, I loved how unapologetic Sully is about who he is. Malik gets him, and that’s all Sully cares about.
Malik is of Syrian descent and a former member of a Syrian gang. The man is 19 years older than Sully, and unlike his self-assured protege, Malik is a mass of self-pity and woes rooted in childhood trauma.
It’s one of the reasons he keeps putting Sully at arm’s length, even though he wants the younger man. He’s also carrying the guilt from a big secret that he should have revealed to his mentee early on, but he didn’t, so it came to bite him in the ass in the form of a Sully meltdown.
Compared to the first book, His Death Bringer, this is a tad less disturbing but still as dark. Please heed the content warnings, especially if blood play is not your thing, because Malik and Sully are heavily into that.
This is not a romance of warm fuzzies. This is a complicated relationship between a traumatized older man who’s touch-starved and hungry for affection, even if he has a hard time admitting it, and a psychopath who doesn’t feel many emotions. This is a slow-burn of 13 stubborn years and a hot/cold dance of one step forward, two steps back, where the hurt comfort comes with a knife and scars are tokens of love.
Sully did all the heavy lifting while Malik is mired in what Sully calls “pathetic self-pity.” There were hardly any private interactions that didn’t devolve to sex, while Malik hopes they can be a normal couple that is more than just sex, a.k.a. the old man needed hugs and cuddles.
There were hardly any proper communications. I say this one is on Malik, who has his electric fences up while Sully was asking Luca (His Death Bringer) for advice and reading romance novels, trying to grasp the mechanics of being in love and the to-dos in a relationship. Our boy was really trying, bless his psychopathic heart!
Something to watch out for is the content-warning confrontation scene between Malik and Sully. It was nothing short of powerful and cathartic! Sully’s jumble of emotions was intensely palpable, and his breakdown was heartwrenching. Malik finally pulled his head out of his ass, but still left me partly unconvinced.
So I didn’t squee, but I rooted hard for Sully. His growth and resilience as a character, his single-minded determination to go after what he wants, and his willingness to go beyond his “limitations” as a psychopath for Malik are what made the book 4 stars for me.
His Bane is a story of kindred souls, warring feelings, and lifelong devotion. It is not a fairytale romance, but love at knife’s edge, painful, intense, and all-consuming.
Rating:
4 Stars – minor quibbles but I loved it to bitsSoundtrack: Knife’s Edge
Artist: Tiger Army
Album: V…_P.S.
I’m ridiculously thrilled about how spot on the book model is! Red hair, copper penny eyes, and all black suit: that’s our Sully!
The District is best enjoyed in chronological order. Meet Luca, survivor, bunny cuddler, and sweetest soul ever, and his dark angel, Dante, in His Death Bringer.
If you like my content, please consider using my Amazon affiliate links below to buy your copy of His Bane. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying Amazon purchases at no additional cost to you.
If you like my content, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi or PayPal. Your donations will help keep this website going. Thank you so much!
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RELEASE TOUR: Pucked Up by E.M. Lindsey (Excerpt)
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PROMO BLITZ: Pucked Up by E.M. Lindsey
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COVER REVEAL: Bratva’s Intern by Gianni Holmes
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RELEASE TOUR: Cloudy With a Chance of Bad Decisions by Fae Quin (Excerpt)
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REVIEW: Sweet by Howl Avery
Sweet – Howl Avery
Will wants to meet the perfect man, but it’s easier said than done in such a small town. His crush of over a year has no idea he even exists, and ignoring his best friend’s advice has only made the problem worse. Rather than limiting himself only to who’s available locally, Will turns to the digital world.
Cas is ready to move on after his last relationship ended in death. Right away, he meets the perfect candidate through a new anonymous chatting app, with only one problem—he quickly learns his new friend’s identity in the real world. If this budding relationship continues, it’ll only be a matter of time before Cas is recognized for who he is as well.
As Will and Cas steadily become closer, their attraction cannot be denied. Nor their similarities. Cas embraces the darkness in Will like no one ever has, creating a mutual obsession that needs to be satisfied in the real world. Maybe Will has finally found the perfect man for him—if he can look past Cas’s homicidal tendencies.
Sweet, a dark romantic thriller by Howl Avery, might change how you see honey. Needless to say, it comes with a long list of TWs, including rough sex, toxic codependencies, humiliation and degradation, consensual non-con, sounding, fisting, and murders.
Will has been crushing on Bailey, a fellow Farmer’s Market vendor, for a long time now. He and his best friend Jesse manage the store for the farm they both work for. Will also just started talking anonymously to a guy on a dating app. Later, he learned his name was Cas.
Will felt an instant chemistry with Cas right away, and he’s tentatively exploring their connection to see if Cas wants to take it further. Meanwhile, Jesse confessed he has feelings for Will, and they begun sleeping together. Will is still crushing hard on Bailey, whom he started stalking, and also pining like hell for Cas.
The love geometry should make this a DNF for me but strangely enough, it didn’t bother me. Will’s connections to these men worked their magic, holding the plot together and fueling the mystery.
In a typical MM romance, the MC would only be sleeping with the love interest, which is a dead giveaway. So even if I figured out Cas’s identity early on, the red herrings effectively had me second-guessing, especially since Will had on-page sex with all three.
Both Will’s and Cas’s POVs were shown.
Cas is a psychopath who uses a convenient, if novel, way of cleaning up evidence. He’s a demisexual who had his awakening because of Will. Cas couldn’t find it in him to kill the man, nor could he get him out of his mind. In other words, he’s obsessing and stalking.
And that’s all we know about Cas because he’s an enigma till the very end.
Will’s characterization was confusing. The opening chapters showed him with crippling social anxiety, barely able to say a word to Bailey. My image of him was that of a short, skinny guy who’s a bit geeky. With Jesse, he was hella toppy and dominant, and I was surprised to learn he’s actually taller than Jesse.
I don’t mind a shy character who likes to take charge in the bedroom. However, Will’s personality was all over the place, sometimes acting like a different person entirely. I chalk this up to the writing. Cas wore different masks depending on who he was talking to, but it still felt cohesive.
One thing’s for sure: Will falls hard for his mystery man and wants to be the end-all and be-all for Cas. Will is the farthest from vanilla, systematically testing Cas’s limits, hence the trigger warnings. Their relationship is a fuck-up codependency of crazy meets insanity, so better get out of their way or burn! It was fanfuckingtastic!
Some aspects, especially the latter parts, were rushed, which is unfortunate because this is a story worth savoring. The ending was so abrupt I was left with my mouth hanging open. This book badly needed an epilogue. It is not perfect, but I was completely hooked and finished it in one sitting.
Sweet explores the complexities of human connection, and the interplay of sweet personalities and darker desires. Overall, a thrilling story of mutual obsession, depraved, alluring, inescapable.
Rating:
4 Stars – minor quibbles but I loved it to bitsSoundtrack: Got You (Where I Want You)
Artist: The Flys
Album: Holiday Man
If you like my content, please consider using my Amazon affiliate links below to buy your copy of Sweet. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying Amazon purchases at no additional cost to you.
If you like my content, please consider supporting me on Ko-fi or PayPal. Your donations will help keep this website going. Thank you so much!
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COVER REVEAL: Pucked Up by E.M. Lindsey
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PROMO BLITZ: Cloudy With A Chance Of Bad Decision by Fae Quin
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RELEASE TOUR: Convenient Rivals by Oliver Takely (Excerpt)
