Sophie Lark has written herself a duology that is seriously dark and twisted with There Are No Saints and There is No Devil. Go ahead and insert a blanket trigger warning here. If you are easily offended or triggered by any thing, this is not the set of books for you. In fact, I almost didn’t start them when I realized that Cole, the male lead, is a serial killer, and that the female lead, Mara, is his latest obsession. Because that is messed up on so many levels. I changed my mind after reading some of the reviews on Amazon and I’m glad I did.
As far as most people know, Cole is a leading artist on the San Francisco art scene. He comes from great privilege and wealth. No one else seems to realize that he is a complete sociopath and presents them with the mask that they most need to see from him.
Mara is a starving artist, eking out a living from three very part-time jobs and sharing a very dilapidated row house with seven other starving artists. The days of starving artists being able to afford lofts are long gone as tech companies and hipsters have pushed them out. Cole sees Mara for the first time at a gallery opening she is attending mostly to make a meal of the buffet of finger foods. When someone spills a glass of merlot on her very white sundress, instead of getting upset about it, she wanders into the bathroom and tie dyes her entire dress so it looks intentional. Cole is very intrigued by her obvious eye for color and ingenuity.
I don’t want to go into any further details about the plot other than to say that there is a rival serial killer, messed up things happen, the sexy times are intense and definitely not vanilla, and we learn a lot about how toxic families can impact who you grow up to be. Are these comfortable reads? Absolutely not. But they are essentially telling the story of two very broken people finding each other and starting the healing journey. Or at least their version of it, because what is normal for them is very definitely NOT normal.
I am giving this set of books 4 out of 5 stars mostly because I am surprised at how sympathetic I found myself toward an unrepentant serial killer.