August 21, 2026 · Bookwyvern

A New Lair for a Wyvern Who Reads Too Much

Okay, I have to be honest with you — I’ve been sitting on this for a while, and I am way too excited to finally let it out into the world.Welcome to…

August 21, 2026 · Book Review

Hunting Adeline

by H.D. Carlton

5 / 5

Hunting Adeline is the highly anticipated conclusion in the Cat and Mouse Duet, picking up after the chilling events of Haunting Adeline. Not for the faint of heart, Carlton takes a plunge deeper into the darkness, pushing the boundaries of what a romance thriller can be. Where the first book was haunting, this one is harrowing-a brutal journey of survival, obsession, and vengeance that drags readers in with every page.

The novel starts with Adeline in captivity, abducted by a strong trafficking organization, the Society. Without freedom, she is thrown into a nightmarish world where the fight for living is unenduring, resisted by will-breaking processes continuously meted out to her. To them, she is just merchandise, a prize to be sold to whatever bidder offers the highest price. And the psychological torture she would have to go through is just soul-crushing.

April 5, 2025 · Book Review

Declan

by Joan Morven

3 / 5

Viviana Morelli is the daughter her father never wanted at the table. When Declan Callaghan, head of the Irish Consortium, is offered his pick of the Morelli sisters in exchange for a stake in the family’s docks, he passes over the two who were groomed for exactly this moment and chooses her instead: the one who spends the gathering ignoring the room, drinking alone at the bar. Married within the week, Viviana is dropped into a mansion full of guns, guards, and three brothers who run half the city’s underworld, expected to play the compliant wife and doing nothing of the sort.

What starts as two people testing how far they can push each other turns into something neither wants to name, right as Viviana starts pulling at a thread in Declan’s past that neither of them can afford to find. The marriage that was supposed to be a business transaction turns into the most dangerous thing either of them has ever signed up for, and the reason it was ever arranged in the first place is darker and more personal than either of them assumes going in.

April 5, 2025 · Book Review

Kingdom of the Two Moons

by Alexandra Thomashoff

3 / 5

Kingdom of the Two Moons opens with a girl on a cliff deciding not to jump, and it never really lets go of that image. Melody has spent her whole life as property: raised by a fae fixer named Lyrian in the human world, beaten into obedience, and forced to use her strange talent for tracking people down to hunt her own kind for him. The book’s real hook isn’t the world it builds, though there’s a lot of it. It’s what happens once Melody gets taken from one owner and handed straight to a bigger one, and has to figure out whether anything about that trade actually counts as freedom.

The plot moves fast in its first half. Lyrian’s true nature unravels almost immediately once Riven, a high lord serving the fae world’s Dark Lord, Caryan, comes to collect Melody on his king’s orders. Caryan, it turns out, has been searching for her for twenty years: she’s named in an ancient prophecy as the one who will “end the blight,” and Caryan himself, an immortal angel who absorbed a genocidal witch queen’s power to escape her, has every reason to think that blight is him. Melody is pulled into Caryan’s court as a slave in every literal sense, caught between his obsessive, controlling fixation on her and Riven’s quieter, genuinely protective devotion, while a splinter faction of winged assassins hunts her to stop Caryan from using her talent to find three lost artifacts capable of ending the brewing war between his kingdom and the elven one next door. A parallel thread follows Blair, a disgraced witch sent to retrieve or kill Melody, whose own chapters (present-day and two-years-before flashbacks) trace a much older, much sadder story about what it costs to survive a genuinely evil ruler. The book builds toward a climax in which Caryan, desperate to keep Melody alive and useful, forces dangerous magic into her against her will, and ends on Melody and Blair’s escape attempt going badly wrong mid-air, with no resolution in sight.

February 13, 2025 · Book Review

One Way Ticket to Earth

by Daniele Vaccaro

3 / 5

Ten-year-old Max dies in a hospital bed, a four-leaf clover his mother once gave him clutched against his chest, promising her he’ll find his way back. Grief breaks his parents in different directions: his mother Elizabeth refuses to let go of the belief that he’s still out there somewhere, and his father Paul, unable to bear the loss, takes his own life not long after.

Light-years away, on a utopian alien world called Anturn where children are born from the fruit of a great tree rather than to a mother, a newborn arrives already fussy and strange, and grows into a boy named Sveern who insists, against everyone’s gentle correction, that his real name is Max and his real home is a planet called Earth. The bulk of the story follows Sveern’s long, lonely campaign to get anyone in Anturn’s government to believe him and let him go home, with only one Anturnian child, Blily, willing to take his claims seriously. What Max finds when he finally does make it back to Earth, and what that four-leaf clover turns out to mean twice over, is the story’s real payoff, and it’s worth encountering without it spoiled here.

January 4, 2025 · Book Review

To Tame An Angel

by Carolina Monte

3.5 / 5

In the Queendom of Actasia, 165 years after a bloody uprising that stripped men of their wings, their rights, and their freedom, women alone hold magic, and every man is bought, chained, and “tamed” into servitude by the woman who purchases him. Nalla, the third daughter of a formidable General, comes of age and selects her first man from the pits: a defiant, caged prisoner known only by his number, who dares to look her in the eye when every other man keeps his gaze on the ground. That single act of defiance is deliberate. He’s chosen her specifically because she looks soft, and he plans to use her kindness to escape.

He does escape, on the very first night, knocking her unconscious and fleeing into the forest. What follows isn’t the story either of them expected. Nalla hunts him down herself rather than report the escape (which would mean his execution), and when she finally corners him, she chooses tending his wounds and asking his name over the punishment she’s been trained since childhood to deliver. The taming that follows is real, and so are its consequences, both in the bedroom and in a household, a family, and a queendom that has no room for what starts growing between them. As Nalla’s mother closes in with a deadline and a threat, the two are forced to reckon with what it would actually cost them, and everyone around them, to want something the law was built specifically to make impossible.

September 27, 2024 · Book Review

A Tale Told By Traitors

by Renee Dugan

3 / 5

Lionyra Vara has spent years building a quiet life as a baker in the port city of Krylan, and hiding, badly enough that it finally catches up with her: the woman hunting her is Lucretzia Nore, the Del’s Own Blade, and the truth Lucretzia drags to the surface is that “Lionyra” is really Alyona Graven, the long-lost heir to the throne of Amere-Del, being hauled home to be married off to a dissident leader as a political peace offering. Aboard the ship carrying her back, she strikes up an easy, unplanned friendship with a deckhand named Bastyan, who turns out to be Ryker Kassian, a pirate captain sailing under a false name specifically to claim her as ransom. What follows is a bargain struck between captor and captive: Lionyra will help Ryker double his payday if he helps her first find Tristah, the decoy and true sister-in-arms she left behind years ago, before Lucretzia can use her as leverage instead.

The search for Tristah pulls both of them through a pirate stronghold built on debt and cruelty, a city simmering with a rebellion led by a masked figure called the Incendiary, and eventually into open war with the Old Salts who profit from misery on every side of Amere-Del’s civil unrest. Loyalties shift, disguises come apart, and by the time the trail leads back to the throne itself, the question isn’t only whether Lionyra can save the people she’s come to love. It’s whether the woman she used to be, and the throne she was born into, will let her go.

September 18, 2024 · Book Review

Desperate Run

by C. J. Riggs, M. L. Burns

4 / 5

Max is a med student with a past she’s buried under sarcasm, one NDA, and a family who sold her out. When she and her friend group win free tickets to the Midnight Menagerie, a traveling horror-carnival where paying guests can be legally “hunted” through a weekend of escalating mazes, she’s claimed almost immediately by Grim, the carnival’s tallest, quietest, and most feared Hunter. What starts as a game becomes something neither of them expected: Grim, whose real name is Draven, is carrying his own seven-year-old grief, and the deeper Max pushes into the carnival’s trials, the more her reasons for being there and his reasons for staying start to look like two halves of the same wound.

The weekend builds through a series of increasingly dangerous mazes, each one testing something different in Max, physically, psychologically, and morally, while Draven’s own past and the carnival’s own rot come to a head around her. What she’s really hunting, and what it will actually cost her to get it, is worth discovering without it spoiled here.

September 17, 2024 · Book Review

New Moon Rising

by Cassandra Featherstone, Serenity Rayne

3 / 5

Twin sisters Fiadh and Feray Morgenstern have spent their whole lives believing they’re both witches, with Fiadh the gifted one and Feray the family “dud” who can’t cast a single spell. At their Ascension ceremony, the ritual where every young witch in the city of Briarvale is supposed to receive her full power and meet her fated mate, everything goes wrong in public and at once: Fiadh’s magic doesn’t manifest as promised, Feray turns out to be a wolf shifter and not a witch at all, and neither of them appears to have a mate. The city’s High Mage seizes the moment to declare them worthless in front of the entire community, and the sisters are shunned on the spot. That same night, the bar and apartment belonging to Philly, the satyr who’s been their found-family father figure since their parents’ deaths, burns to the ground.

Cast out of witch society and homeless, Fiadh and Feray take jobs at a vampire-owned BDSM nightclub and slowly rebuild, only to discover the Ascension lied to them twice over: they do have mates, several each, who simply weren’t present at the ceremony because witches and shifters and Fae don’t all attend the same rites. As the sisters settle into new poly households with their respective partners, they start pulling on a thread that runs from a mysterious symbol carved into Philly’s back after a second attack, back to their parents’ unsolved, deeply suspicious deaths three years earlier, and into a prophecy that names the sisters the “Children of the Moon,” destined for a battle neither of them understands yet.

July 17, 2024 · Book Review

All Your Bloody Lies

by M. L. Burns

3.5 / 5

Xeraphine has spent ten years hunting the five men who abducted, tortured, and buried her alive a decade ago, using the seductive, life-draining power of her Succubus nature (an ability she calls her Amoro) to track and kill anyone connected to them. Kairhyse, a Vampire enforcer assigned to stop a string of high-profile murders traced back to her, catches her mid-kill and becomes obsessed rather than turning her in, choosing instead to shield her from his own employer while chasing her, sleeping with her, and slowly becoming genuinely entangled in her life and her revenge.

What follows is a slow-burn, extremely explicit romance built on constant push-and-pull: Xeraphine’s refusal to be claimed, owned, or loved standing directly against Kairhyse’s total, possessive devotion, while she works her way methodically through the remaining men responsible for her captivity. Her best friend Sydni and an old ally named Tyson round out the found family orbiting her, even as the killings draw the attention of rival supernatural power structures who have their own reasons to want Xeraphine found, controlled, or silenced. The book builds toward a final confrontation that recontextualizes who has actually been hunting her all along, and ends with no resolution in sight.