Leather & Lark

An assassin who wears reading glasses is standing in a leather workshop being informed that he is going to have to get married.

Dark romance was billed and a comedy turns up with a severed finger in it. Weaver runs a fake marriage between two people who kill predatory men for a living, one professionally and one by vocation, and plays most of it for laughs while the content warnings run to sexual abuse and worse.

The comedy and the content warnings share a room, which is the entire proposition. A finger in a snow globe sits four pages from material about children, and either the tonal collision is the point or the book is making light of things that do not lighten. Weaver offers no separate register for the serious parts.

Hostility that resets stops meaning anything, and the structure keeps demanding it. A fake marriage needs these two antagonistic. A murder investigation needs them cooperating. Each collaborative scene lowers the temperature, so the bickering has to be reinstated afterwards, and animosity that gets rebuilt on schedule reads as a setting rather than a feeling.

Lark makes trophies. Lark enjoys the work. Lark was pushed into it by something specific rather than born to it, and Weaver keeps the enjoyment and the cause in frame together instead of using one to excuse the other.

Lachlan is the joke and the joke is good. A contract killer who blushes, keeps a leather studio, wants out, and delivers the longest grovel in the sub-genre. The most lethal person in the book is also the least comfortable in a conversation.

The marriage device has an actual mechanism, which the trope often lacks. Somebody is targeting her family and framing his brother, and a public union puts them in the same rooms and the same records without either having to explain the proximity.

A third perspective runs underneath and it changes the reading. Somebody is watching, chapter by chapter, and Weaver uses the extra viewpoint to supply dread that neither lead can access, which is a cleaner solution than having them be inexplicably slow.

Found family is the load this trilogy carries, and it settles here. Two brothers, two women who have chosen each other, and a group whose bond is that everybody knows exactly what everybody else has done.

Weaver's prose is faster than it is careful and the speed is a choice. Short chapters, high banter density, plot arriving on a schedule, and a reader who wants sentences will find the book uninterested in providing them.

Serial-killer romcom sounds like a dare and mostly it works, because the moral arithmetic is stated up front and never fudged. These people kill predators. The book does not ask to be admired for it.

Somebody is coming for her family. He married her to stand in the way.