I absolutely loved this book! I am so excited that I found a dark romance standalone that has substance to go along with the smut. It had everything that I love in a story, a mystery that takes time to unravel, a fair bit of gore, science, and a little bit of drama.
Our main lady, Lilia Vespertine, is an intelligent girl who dreams of being a doctor as she takes one or two classes a semester at a community college while she works full time and then some. Miserable, constantly exhausted, and always worried about money, Lilia thinks it will take her a decade or more before she can reach her dreams, if they are even possible at all. After a professor is very impressed over a paper she wrote, Lilia is given the opportunity to have her dreams come true, with a full scholarship for a semester at a prestigious university. She does the smart thing and leaves her very unfulfilling life behind.
The way the author describes the campus makes me wish it was real and that I was even a little bit qualified to go there. Old, gothic buildings converted into lecture halls, classrooms, and dorms, with the addition of modern structures and modern amenities, on an isolated island that also has a beautiful town. Lilia is one of the few students that is not privileged, making her feel like an imposter as she walks around campus in her second hand clothes and borrowed laptop, surrounded by young people in designer fashions that drink eight dollar coffees. She finds it hard to make friends, never really having had time for them in the past four years, but there is one person that it seems she would make all the time in the world for. That person just happens to be one of her professors, Devryck Bramwell.
He is such an immovable, cold, intelligent character, I was instantly into him. He was pretty much my ideal fictional guy, super smart, driven, with strict self imposed rules that he eventually breaks. He is not nice, and he often speaks cruelly, but when he finds something that he is passionate about he would do anything to protect it, or in this case, her.
If you love a dark tale, with scandal and danger, and dirty, passionate scenes, you will really enjoy this book. I see myself reading this again in the very near future. I almost wish it wasn’t a standalone, I would love to see more of the characters, but the author has said she would not be writing any additional books about Lilia and Devryck. I kind of hope that she changes her mind.
Nonfiction and Nonsense 