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Part of my ongoing work(!) research into smutty genres. Very interesting and I think very good depiction of a D/s dynamic and BDSM in general. I don't think I found Violet very believable as a character. At times, I had completely forgotten that she is supposed to be a though businesswomen in her daily life. As with the previous Court of Chains book, I liked the non-main characters better and found that there was too little fantasy plot to really drive my interest. It does have a lot of smut, and that isn't badly written. My main problem is that I was reading this to get a feeling for "dark romance", and even if this was sold to me as being part of that genre, I only found traces of that.

I enjoyed this a lot, but it took me a long time to read. This was mainly because the main story, Stag Dance, was quite a hill to climb. I enjoyed it, but the setting and the language were a bit of a hurdle. My favourite story was "Infect your friends and loved ones", which works better than the novel that was inspired by it, Manhunt.

This was sold to me as "dark romance", in difference to Fourth Wing (romantasy). There aren't a lot of differences, I would say these two books fit perfectly in the same genre considering the amounts of fantasy, sex and love and type of sexual interaction. Maybe that will change with the second book, but I'm not sure I'll ever read it.

I read this only for research purposes and I'm afraid I need to read the next one in the series, purely for research purposes of course.