Crown Me Dead: A Dark Fantasy Romance (Heartstring Duet Book 1)
There's a particular kind of dark fantasy that pulls you in not with grandeur, but with grime. Crown Me Dead opens in a graveyard, and it never really leaves one. Our heroine is a gravedigger's daughter, born into poverty and shaped by loss, spending her days burying strangers while the people she loves slowly fall apart around her. Then her brother starts coughing blood, and everything changes. A stranger arrives with a proposition so cold it almost takes your breath away. Seduce the king. Take the crown. Then die for it. In exchange, her brother gets to live. It's the kind of bargain that belongs in the dark, and Zander writes it that way. Kael, the rotting ruler at the centre of all this, is no conventional love interest. He's a wreck of a man with power he wears like a wound. Vale, his sharp and calculating associate, has his own unsettling role to play. One of them wants her heart to keep beating. The other is quietly making arrangements for when it doesn't. Watching her navigate both is quietly thrilling. What stops this from becoming a grim slog is the heroine herself. She isn't passive. She's patient, and there's a difference. She knows graves. She knows what gets buried and what gets found later. This is book one of a two-part story, and it carries all the deception, tension, and romantic menace you'd hope for from that setup. Zander also coins her own version of a happy ending, one that fits the tone rather nicely. The book contains violence and darker themes, so it's worth checking the author's website if you'd like more detail before reading. Not for the faint-hearted, but genuinely rewarding for those who like their romance with teeth.
- Author: Liv Zander
- Publisher: Ink Heart Publishing
- Genre: Romance
- ISBN: 978-1955871143
- Pages: 270 pages