Genre: Romance/Thriller/Mystery
Plot: Your next stay-up-all-night thriller, about identical triplets who have a nasty habit of killing their boyfriends, and what happens when the youngest commits their worst crime falling in love with her mark.
Make him want you.
Make him love you.
Make him dead.
Sissy has an…interesting family. Always the careful one, always the cautious one, she has handled the cleanup while her serial killer sisters have carved a path of carnage across the U.S. Now, as they arrive in the Arizona heat, Sissy must step up and embrace the family pastime of making a man fall in love and then murdering him. Her first target? A young widower named Edison—and their mutual attraction is instant. While their relationship progresses, and most couples would be thinking about picking out china patterns and moving in together, Sissy’s family is reminding her to think about picking out a burial site and moving on.
Then something happens that Sissy never She begins to feel protective of Edison, and before she can help it, she’s fallen in love. But the clock is ticking, and her sisters are growing restless. It becomes clear that the grave site she chooses will hide a body no matter what happens; but if she betrays her family, will it be hers?
Opinion:
“Still, I think about cutting him open. Finding the chambers of his heart. Observing his stomach and whatever contents are left there.
The parts of himself so deep that even he has never seen them.”
Never have I ever encountered a story so completely romantic, yet so deeply fucked.
Dear Ren DeStefano,
I’ll do your bidding. Whatever you want.
“He doesn’t see me because he isn’t supposed to. Not yet. I am just a tiny little planet in a black, black galaxy, surrounded by debris and dead stars. But I see him, and that’s all that matters.”
Sissy and her sisters have been fighting to get back to each other since the day their mother abandoned them in a stroller at a truck stop. Ripped apart and thrust into brutal, unforgiving and unpredictable foster families, all the girls had ever wanted was to be back with one another. And since they turned 18, they have been. But when Iris kills a man she’d fallen in love with, the girls found a new sort of life for themselves. One where they loved across the United States, murdering as they went. But now Moody and Iris say that it’s Sissy’s turn to fall in love. Her turn to romanticize a man into death. Because Sissy has always been the one to clean up the messes, not create the mess. And when Sissy finds her target, she knows without a doubt he’s the one. Edison. He is who she will fall in love with for the very first time, and he will be her first kill. But as Sissy dives into her new identity as Jade, who says all the right things and is a picture of perfection, she can’t help but fall hard for Edison. But she can’t tell her sisters the truth…that she’s having second thoughts about killing him. Because one thing they’ve always said is that love will kill you and the only love they need is from each other.
“I can clean a man’s blood from the tiles. I can ease the plastic bag from his lifeless face and soak it to remove the DNA and then use it the next morning to hold my flowers at the farmer’s market. I can cut off his limbs while I’m fully naked so that I won’t have to do the laundry, and bury all the pieces. But figuring out what to say to a man you’re trying to seduce is its own brand of frustrating.”
One of the first thoughts I had while reading this story was that this book is basically the women’s bible for killing your lover.
We learn to seduce, we learn to entice. We learn to launder your clothes at least three times, to not use too much bleach on the floor and to always pull out a man’s teeth, smash them with a hammer and flush the powdered remnants down the toilet.
“I’m the one who cleans the messes, Dara. Because the ones who make them always find me.”
But all the pro tips aside…let me tell you how floored I was by this book.
I am in bliss.
I am in awe.
Pure obsession.
PURE JOY.
“‘What are you thinking?’
How beautiful the need in your eyes would be if I wrapped my hands around your throat. The silent, desperate, begging.”
This is probably the most beautiful dark romance I have ever read. THIS is the type of dark romance I’ve been craving. Not pages of smut that make me feel deeply unsafe and question what is going on with the women in the world and their book choices (she says as she romanticizes murder). The dark romance in this book is borderline obsessive, all-consuming and hungry. But it’s also so innocent, gentle, pure and realistic. These characters feel REAL. They are flawed, human and regular. They are not special. They are not unique. They’re just people.
“I want to be following my target right now, watching his silhouette through the blinds as he moves around his bedroom. I want to be imagining how he smells and what it will be like to touch him, and whether to bury him in one piece.”
The book is about Sissy’s first kill – she is to find a target, make him fall in love with her and then kill him after a few months. The girls must make friends, create alibis and plan the perfect murder so that they may move on to the next state and their next target. Sissy has always been the one to clean up the job after one of her sister’s makes a kill. She scrubs the scene, launders the clothes, chops the body and disposes of it. So naturally, her sisters think it’s time she starts pulling her weight.
“If childhood in foster care taught me to be observant and moody to be assertive, it taught iris to be invisible.”
Edwin is a fantastic man who has experienced immense loss and addiction. He has moments of anger and weakness, but as men go, he’s a really wonderful guy and very normal. Edison knows Sissy as Jade, her cover name, and she comes across so sweet, pure, innocent and forgiving. They naturally fall for each other and create a bond quickly, because of how effortlessly content they are with one another.
The crazy part is how calculated everything is that Sissy/Jade says and does.
I mean shit, this girl knows how to seduce a man.
“When he cries out, I cover his mouth with my hand, not to stifle his sounds, but to catch them, so that I might carry them inside me, and keep them when he’s gone.”
Sissy/Jade is the epitome of cool, calm and collected. She sees 10 steps ahead of everyone, knows how to school her emotions and features, and always plays the correct move. She creates Jade to be a church-goer who is in town to settle a family member’s affairs after a death. She plays the guitar and sings, and gives off the typical “girl next door” appearance. And even though she has this robotic nature around murder and what her and her sisters are doing, she’s so likable. I love her character to pieces. She is warm, loving, and normal…mostly.
“At least help me decide where to scatter her ashes, you selfish bitch.”
And though this is a romance between Sissy and her target, the other huge theme is love for family and the things you will do to protect one another. Because the relationship between the girls, though deeply beautiful, it’s also toxic. And yes, that may be a no-brainer when you think about what they help each other do. But really, the dedication and ferocity these girls have to protect and love one another is enviable. They will burn the world for each other.
“Moody and Iris are a religion, a sanctuary from the storm.”
And though I like Moody, Iris and Sissy/Jade, you couldn’t help but feel slightly anxious and suspicious of them. They all possess a rage or a quiet calm that feels too calculated to be unpredictable, which made me on edge the entire time that something horrible was going to happen.
Don’t get me wrong – fucked up things happen in this book. Things that made me hurt. Loss, death, heartbreak, unfair choices and situations. The ending is gutting, but there is so much character development that happens so you aren’t left wanting.
“I dream that it crumbles into dust and dissolves inside my womb.”
And if you couldn’t tell from the millions of quotes, this book is stuffed with breathtaking sentences and thoughts from Sissy/Jade.
It’s enough to make a grown woman crumble!
“I wanted to climb inside her brain and sit beside her, because I loved her, and I didn’t want her to be trapped in that dark place by herself.”
This has become my new favorite book – hands down. No questions asked. I loved every second of it and even stopped reading it for a few weeks because I was depressed about finishing it. It’s THAT good. So good in fact, I posted a few quotes on bookstagram and my friend immediately bought the book and finished with me as a buddy read.
“Always say your dad is on the way, even if you’ve never met your dad.”
Now begs the question…wtf do I do until Ren DeStefano blesses us with another book?! Your guess is as good as mine, but let me tell you, my near future looks bleak without her dark romantic words filling up my little black soul.
“Never forget the strength it took to do this.”
jenacidebybibliophile 