‘I should be used to the revulsion by now. Yet on the rare occasion, someone glimpses me in the light, I am reminded who I am. The monster lurking in the shadows. The scarred remains of the only De La Rosa male to crawl from the ashes of our destruction.’

Requiem of the Soul by A. Zavarelli and Natasha Knight is book one in a trilogy with a bitch of a cliff-hanger. The neighbours probably heard us shout noooooooo when we realised there were no more pages left to read! We are in a dark romance kind of mood at the moment, and this is definitely everything we crave, though we will say the romance is a slow build, in the sense it’s more ‘hate-mance’ so far. Can we coin that phrase, or has it already been used?

‘Ivy may have readily attached herself to me, but she will come to understand the only wedded bliss she is to receive are the punishments I dole out.’

Elements of this dark almost gothic-like story is similar to books we’ve read before, however, it felt new and fresh, so we were hooked from the get-go! Think of a melting pot of a secret criminal society, a forced age gap marriage, ritualistic and fucked up blood thirsty ‘families’, murder and revenge with a ‘Beauty and the Beast’ type ‘hate-mance’ and a violent erotic underground Phantom of The Opera (without the singing Ha!)….aaaaand you’re there! However, we know we’ve only scratched the surface in book one; hopefully, we won’t have to wait to long for the next instalment because we are dying for it! If you love this trope as much as we do then you -without a doubt- need to add this trilogy to your reading list. We have a feeling this ride is going to get even more torturous and dark, but we are here for it!

‘The doors close behind us, that final divide between what was and what will be. My past and my present. The voice inside my head urging me to run grows louder, but I don’t run. It’s no use.’

Requiem of the Soul is flawlessly written, intensely exciting, passionately dark, and horrifyingly compelling. We know we shouldn’t have, but we’ve fallen down that deep dark spiral of love, with Santiago De La Rosa. Imperfectly perfect in the way we love our anti-heroes to be, he is the devil incarnate but has that faint spark of vulnerability and a deeply buried soul, we can just about see. The soul that only Ivy can unearth. That’s why we’ve fallen for him and why the fierce and brave Ivy Moreno feels justifiably conflicted. We do love a twisted and at times uncomfortable read that makes us question ourselves, and when it’s written as well as Requiem of the Soul is, with those sporadic moments of humanity, we just can’t look away! Ruthless and harrowing, poor Ivy is like a lamb to slaughter when she’s ‘given’ by her scheming brother to a man hellbent on avenging the deaths of his family. He is a ‘monster’ feared in the society of the Sovereign Sons and poor beautiful and at times fragile Ivy has no idea what she’s in for!

‘Every last Moreno will pay in blood and misery so acute, they will know suffering more intimately than I ever could.’



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