About a year ago The Ruinous Love books by Brynne Weaver entered my world, and now I’ve read the final one and it was just what I wanted it to be without me having known what I wanted it to be when I went in. Scythe & Sparrow tells the story of Fionn and Rose that has been teased since Sloane and Rowan show up on Fionn’s doorstep in Butcher & Blackbird. Fionn is the youngest Kane sibling, a doctor who walked away from a promising surgical career in Boston and relocated himself to small town Nebraska to come to terms with himself following a failed proposal (she thankfully is NOT in this book). A few years into his self-imposed exile the Silveria Circus comes to town and with it Rose Evans and her motorcycle riding, tarot-reading, murder aiding/committing ways.
Similarly to Leather & Lark this one backtracks to before we originally met the characters in the previous book and lays in the backstory (we’re maybe a third of the way in before the corresponding scene in Butcher & Blackbird appears). When the most recent scared woman in her tarot tent strikes a chord with Rose, as does her despicable husband, Rose decides to deal with him herself and as this is a Brynne Weaver book, that means murder. Since Rose doesn’t take the time to plan, things get away from her and the husband manages to break her leg in multiple places and she heads to the nearest clinic she can find which happens to be Fionn’s medical office. His burglar alarm alerts him to a break in, and when he gets there, he finds a nearly unconscious Rose in desperate medical need. Her only word to him before passing out is help and it becomes the driving beat of the first sections of the book as he does just that.
What I loved most about Scythe & Sparrow was the contradictions that defined the characters of Fionn and Rose. Rose is warm, funny, and deeply in tune with people. She is a killer that still gets queasy at the sight of blood and gore (her previous methodology for helping women in need was providing her own version of Aqua Tofana and for reasons explored in the book decided to be more proactive). She’s also a highly practical adventure-taker who has impulse control issues that lead Fionn to nickname her Mayhem. Fionn is the sexy, button-upped doctor who accidentally picked up a crochet hobby and watches reality television when not running miles each day but also has a dark side he is scared to embrace and has been actively distancing himself from since his childhood.
But perhaps the most important part of the reading experience for me was that I genuinely laughed aloud a lot while reading. The comedic component of the comedic dark romance was balanced nicely, because these are in fact dark books (please, read the content warnings at the beginning of each book before embarking on them. I had to skim a little this time, but I was prepared that I might have to.).
This one is also a slow burn with a lot of mutual pining as Rose and Fionn fall for each other while she stays with him while her broken leg heals. The pining balances out the murder and mayhem with softness and yearning. In an opinion that I don’t think will be the popular one, this one might be my favorite of the three, and the only reason I’m not confident in saying so (one way or the other) is that there were some structural elements in how this was told that robbed it a little bit. Weaver makes the choice to have the non-POV character from the pair’s previous appearances in B&B and L&L be the POV character in this one, but because they are often not in the room/space for those initial interactions they are left out of Scythe & Sparrow in a way that was jarring. There are also some plot points that weren’t strengthened enough here – the friendship between Rose and Sloan and Lark, Roses’s reasons for wanting to move to Boston to name a few. I’ve seen other people’s reviews ding this book that Rose is never in serious danger of being caught by police for her crimes that Fionn has to help clean up, and my reading experience was that Leander had been helping things along in order to have so much blackmail on Fionn to push the third act action and break-up, but that isn’t explicit on the page, but not much is with the character of Leander.
I appreciated though that this book’s plot is the relationship between the characters and the mayhem they create and surrounds them. Part of the weakness of L&L is that it had a singular Big Bad. B&B snuck its Big Baddies in along the way, making them part of the plot of the annual murder competition and that worked, as much as this book not having a real Big Bad, just an antagonist that Rose failed to kill in the beginning of the book who doesn’t stop being a menace, but he isn’t what’s keeping Rose and Fionn apart. And that might be why I loved this one so much, because once the characters realize what is really keeping them a part, we get another great long form grovel (the best part of L&L) which is the cherry on the sundae for me.