Olivia Wenzel's Reviews > Saint

Tropes/Themes:
✨M/F dark romance
✨masked stalker hero
✨touch her and die (literally)
✨morally irredeemable hero
✨virgin heroine
✨new adult college setting
✨twisted fraternity
✨dual pov
✨book #1 in an interconnected standalone series

Thanks so much to The Author Agency for this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

Release date: July 26th, 2024

”He tells me to call him Saint because he saved me…that I should be thankful he spared me a worse fate. I’m tempted to fight him or bargain. But when Saint tells me to run, a twisted part of me wonders if he’ll chase.”

Wow, the dark romance girlies are going to EAT THIS UP!! I obviously knew this was going to be dark based off the synopsis/content warnings, but this is definitely one of the darkest romances I’ve read in a while! This was the perfect book I needed to shake up my reading slump. Violet is a criminal psychology major in a semi-long term relationship with her toxic boyfriend, Liam. Saint is a mysterious masked psychopath that Violet and Liam pick up after finding him hitchhiking on their way to a Valentine's Massacre party. The encounter ultimately leaves Liam dead and Violet the target of Saint’s obsession.

Fun may not be the best word for it, but I seriously had so much fun with this! The twisted academia setting was incredibly atmospheric and was such an interesting background to Saint and Violet's twisted games. Saint is a morally irredeemable psychopath, but you can’t help but root for him at times. Violet goes through so much growth over the course of the book as she gets in touch with the darker side of herself that she's kept buried over the years. I wish we could have gotten a little more from the side characters, but I'm excited to see that some of them are already getting their own books! I'm excited to see where this series goes.

This is a very dark romance, so be sure to do your own CW research before diving in. Author includes a detailed list of content warnings on her website, but I included some notable ones that stuck out to me below:

dubcon, cnc, sexual assault, stalking, domestic violence, suicide, torture, murder, abduction, primal play, fear kink, knife play, blood play, pregnant woman completing suicide, corpse mutilation, and a whole lot more