Summary: Butcher & Blackbird

The GIST

Butcher & Blackbird by Brynne Weaver is the book that put the words "dark romantic comedy" on the bestseller list. First published in 2023, it is the opening volume of the Ruinous Love trilogy, a set of linked stand-alone novels that became a number one New York Times bestselling series after readers on TikTok passed it from hand to hand. The pitch is as blunt as a cleaver: two serial killers, each of whom hunts only other serial killers, meet by accident, become friends, turn their hobby into a yearly competition, and slowly, awkwardly, fall for each other. The cover line says it all: "Every serial killer needs a friend. Every game must have a winner."

It should not work, and for plenty of readers it doesn't. For many others the collision of slasher-film gore, banter and yearning is unlike any romance they have read. Weaver tells the story in alternating chapters from her two leads, supplies a playlist with a song for each chapter, and promises a happy ending. She also opens with a long list of content warnings, and means them. This is an adult novel, explicit in both its violence and its sex, and it wants you to laugh in between.

The Story

We meet Sloane Sutherland at the worst moment of her career. Sloane is the killer the press calls the Orb Weaver, known for the elaborate, signature way she arranges a scene, and her targets are exclusively men who are murderers themselves. Her latest was Albert Briscoe. The kill succeeded; the exit did not. Sloane has ended up locked inside the very cage she rigged for him, and his body is lying just beyond the bars, out of reach and well past fresh. It is a revolting, darkly funny opening, and it tells you a great deal about her: meticulous, proud, stubborn and very much alone.

The person who finally walks in is not a rescuer in any ordinary sense. Rowan Kane is a handsome, quick-tongued Irishman who has also come to kill Albert Briscoe and finds the job done and its author stuck in her own trap. Rowan is the Boston Butcher, and the two are drawn to each other on the spot. He lets her out, christens her Blackbird, and takes her to dinner.

For Sloane, who has never been truly seen by anyone outside her one close friendship, the evening is unnerving. Here is a man who knows exactly what she is and is charmed by it. Her instinct is to bolt. Rowan, already smitten and aware that she is as skittish as a wild thing, comes up with a way to see her again that will not scare her off: a game. Once a year they will be pointed at the same target, a serial killer somewhere in the country, and whoever gets to him first wins. Rowan's older brother Lachlan, a contract killer by trade, will choose the quarry and send the clues.

A year passes. Sloane is tempted to skip it, but her best friend, Lark Montague, a relentlessly sunny singer-songwriter, pushes her to go. The first clue leads to a remote inn near a hiking trail where walkers have a habit of disappearing, run by an innkeeper named Francis who warns his guests off the path. Sloane and Rowan take rooms on either side of a thin wall, each trying to outmaneuver the other while pretending not to notice how much they enjoy the company. The discovery that the inn has eyes, quite literally, in its walls turns the contest into a partnership for a night. Sloane goes home with an unexpected souvenir: the innkeeper's cat, Winston.

So it goes, year after year, with long gaps between. The hunts carry them, as the book's own description has it, from small-town West Virginia to upscale California and from downtown Boston to rural Texas, and the monsters they meet are winks at horror cinema. There is the peeping innkeeper with his Norman Bates air. There is Thorsten Harris, a cultured host with a taste for human flesh, who invites the pair to an elaborate dinner at his home, where they are waited on by a silent, damaged servant named David. And there is Harvey Mead, a chainsaw-wielding recluse in a house of horrors. Each encounter goes wrong in its own inventive way, and each ends with the two hunters trusting each other a little more. One famously stomach-turning scene has made readers swear off ice cream.

Between hunts, the real story inches forward. Sloane works a day job and lives in Raleigh; Rowan is a chef who runs a restaurant in Boston. She flies up to see his restaurant, loses her nerve, invents a business trip and flees, leaving behind only a sketch of a raven. He turns up in her city unannounced and, careful not to spook her, has groceries delivered to her door and talks her through cooking dinner over the phone. In conversations like that one, the masks slip. Rowan tells her about a brutal childhood: an abusive father, and an older brother who ended that abuse for good. Cooking began as a way of feeding his brothers. Sloane, for her part, admits how she started. Her first victim was a professor who had preyed on Lark, and she has been removing men like him from the world ever since.

Both of them are bad at this. Rowan is so worried about frightening her that he disguises his feelings as friendship. Sloane is so sure nobody could want her that she reads his caution as indifference. When he invites her to a glamorous gala, she thinks it is finally a date, and then learns he has arranged for them to stalk a murderous doctor there, on the theory that she would need an excuse to come. She takes it as proof that the game is all he wants. The evening is cut short, and months go by.

It takes real danger to break the stalemate. A hunt leaves Sloane badly hurt, and since two serial killers cannot very well walk into an emergency room, Rowan drives her across the country to Nebraska, where his younger brother Fionn, a doctor with complications of his own, patches her up. In that borrowed house, with Rowan looking after her, the pretending stops. She discovers what he did with the raven drawing she left behind, and how long he has been waiting.

Sloane moves to Boston. Rowan is opening a second restaurant and names it Butcher & Blackbird. For a little while they have something that looks like an ordinary happy life, give or take the hobby. But things keep going wrong at both restaurants, breakdowns and emergencies nobody can explain, and Rowan is fraying under the strain. As the novel's description warns, the ghosts the two of them have left in their wake are only a few steps behind. Someone has been watching, and the next round of the game will not be one they chose. How it plays out is for the book to tell.

What It's Really About

Strip away the blood and this is a classic friends-to-lovers romance about two people who believe they are unlovable. Each has built a life around a secret that rules out intimacy. What they find in each other is the thing the publisher's description names exactly: the friendship of a like-minded, pitch-black soul. The appeal is being fully known. Rowan never asks Sloane to be softer or safer; the worst thing about her is the first thing he learned, and he adored her anyway. His declaration is typical of the book's fevered register: "I want to ruin her so that she's mine, my beautiful disaster. My wild creature. My goddess of chaos."

The novel also plays with vigilante justice as wish fulfilment. Its heroes kill, but only those who prey on the innocent, in the tradition of the television series Dexter, and the villains are grotesque enough that readers are invited to cheer. Sloane's origin, avenging a friend whom no one else protected, gives that fantasy an emotional root. Around the couple, Weaver builds a found family: loyal Lark, gruff Lachlan and weary Fionn, each of whom gets a later volume.

Mostly, though, readers come for the tone. The book treats atrocity as the backdrop for a meet-cute and swings between flirtation, slapstick and gore. Fans call it a wild ride and praise the dual points of view, the road-trip hunts and the full-cast-style audiobook, in which two narrators play off each other. Detractors find the characters thinly sketched, the mechanics of the game unexplained, the time jumps confusing and the dialogue juvenile; one reviewer felt the Boston chapters dragged compared with the hunts. Opinions run from one star to five, and which camp you land in depends largely on how you feel about dark romance.

Who Should Read It

This is for adult readers who already enjoy dark romance or want to try it with a heavy dose of humor: fans of morally black-hearted leads, slow-burn pining, horror-movie references and a guaranteed happy ending. It is emphatically not for the squeamish. The violence is graphic, the sex scenes are explicit, and at least one chapter may put you off your dinner. Read the author's content warnings first. If they make you grin instead of wince, you are the audience.