X’s And O’s by Elle Thorpe
Publisher: Self-Published
Genre: Contemporary, Romance
Rating: 3 stars
Reviewed by Fern

One minute I’m cleaning toilets for minimum wage.
The next, I’m waking up from a drug-induced nap with a monster staring down at me.

Kidnapped and seconds from death, I think I’m done for…
Until masked men burst in, murder my attacker, and turn my world upside down.

They call themselves Murder Squad.

A secret brotherhood of broken men who only kill the worst of the worst.

And one of them thinks I’m his wife.

X is unhinged, obsessed, and deadly. A psychopath who hides behind bad jokes and bloodstained fingers.

Whip’s older, grumpy, and used to women paying him to worship them. But when he finds out I’m a virgin, he can’t keep his hands off my plus-size curves.

And Levi? One year of handwritten letters was all it took to fall in love with a man I’d never met. My prison pen pal turned killer, fighting his darkness for a second chance.

But they aren’t the only psychopaths in Saint View.

Someone’s playing a twisted game, leaving rhyming threats and promising to end us all if we don’t stop them first.

With every lie we uncover, every secret we expose, the danger mounts.
Until there’s only one thing we know for sure.

There’s a killer out there.
And this time, he’s hunting us.

Violet is a cleaner going about her regular life, when she is drugged by a new client and wakes up to find herself in a terrifying situation that turns her life upside down. In under a week, she goes from being a curvy, shy normal virgin to a woman who finds herself with three vastly different men all determined to protect and ravish her. The fact one of the men is apparently a jovial psychopath and the other is her newly released prison pen pal just makes the entire situation even more confusing. Will
Violet’s life ever go back to the way it once was?

I picked up this book on a whim after seeing some advertisements for it and it was absolutely not what I was expecting. I believe this is the first official “dark romance” book that I’ve ever read – and certainly it’s the first thing I’ve ever seen by this author or anywhere near this book plot-wise. I’d never heard of the genre “dark rom com” before but I have to say that sums this up fairly well. There are absolutely some dark themes in this book (murder, capture, threatened rape etc) but I have to say that I feel like the tone and voice this book is written in is definitely humorous and almost the kind of lightness you do find in a regular romcom movie. With antics and banter and a lightness to the whole tone – and thankfully none of the darker themes were dwelled upon or heavy-handed – so at no stage did I feel weighted down or like the darker aspects were uncomfortable or really wallowed in. Don’t get me wrong, the darker themes were present, but I certainly felt they were more as “part of the whole” rather than front and center.

Readers should also be really clear that there are three main male characters along with Violet as the main female character. And all three men have seriously romantic/sexual feelings for Violet. I also definitely feel two of the men have a growing attraction between them and I thought there was some definite chemistry between them on top of their strong attraction to Violet. For most of the book the “romance” was fairly complicated and probably not the sort of thing you’re going to want people reading over your shoulder on the train to work in the mornings. There is quite a bit of spice in this book – but I have to admit I didn’t feel there was the same level of bedroom antics that a lot of erotica books have. I felt there was quite a bit of progress and plot outside the bedroom to go along with the spice. I thought this was really well balanced in this book.

Overall, I found this book to be very well written, lighthearted and at time hilarious. I did grow frustrated with the repeated miscommunication/misunderstandings between Levi and Violet. Having exchanged more than a hundred letters in a year – most of them deeply personal – I strongly feel their crossed wires should not have occurred when Levi was released and they met up in real life. A part of me wonders if the author simply wanted Violet to have time and emotional room to fall for both Whip and X so their attachments and the foursome would make sense. I got quite annoyed though, so I really do feel the Violet/Levi thing could have been handled far better and not been so frustrating. I also didn’t fully see the whole Whip/Violet appeal but am willing to roll with that for now. I didn’t feel as convinced by their attraction and chemistry as I did with Violet/Levi and Violet/X. That said, there was a lot happening in this book and it’s the first of a trilogy, so I’m happy to hold judgement on whether Violet/Whip makes sense or feels right to me, at least for now.

X, however, definitely stood out to me as a fairly unique character. Extremely funny and an utter psychopath, yet somehow extremely loveable at the same time. He’s quite perplexing and I’ll be glad to read more about him in the next book. Readers should absolutely be warned that this book ends on a cliffhanger. I admit I immediately went out to purchase the second book which almost certainly was the whole point of ending the book in the manner that the author did it. Generally speaking, though I hate cliffhangers and I checked that the third (and, I believe, final book) was already released before I got even more invested than I already am.

Readers who might be looking to dip a toe into the whole Dark Romance genre to see what all the talk and fuss is about might want to start here. There are definitely dark themes and spicy sex – but I do feel that the humourous tone to the book as a whole and the lighter aspects make this a less daunting prospect to see if it’s your cup of tea or not.