Antonia Bernardin

My 66th book of the year was Dark Fae by Caroline Peckham and Susanne Valenti, this is the first book in the Ruthless Boys of the Zodiac series.

This is set in the same universe as the Zodiac Academy series, slightly before the timeline of the series (I think).

A sort of summary

Elise is left completely broken by her brother’s death and sets out to figure out how he died, because even though the police have told her that he died of an overdose, she doesn’t believe it. After a guy high on the same drug her brother supposedly died of gives her the tip off that one of the ‘kings’ at aurora academy would kill him for telling her anything more, before shoving an ice spike in his own chest, Elise hacks her way into joining the academy too.

She quickly catches the attention of her four suspects, two of which are leader of the rival gangs that rule the city, the other is a powerful, mysterious harpy and the last is a lion shifter whose part of a prolific crime family. As Elise fights for her position in the school, she investigates her brothers death, walking the dangerous tight rope of playing the four most powerful fae at her school against each other, keeping them close without them realising the truth… only problem is, she seems to find herself just as drawn to them as they did her. There’s also a potential cult who may be responsible for his death instead and Elise is caught right in the middle of all of it.

My thoughts

I enjoyed this book, it’s a little darker (if you can believe that) than the Zodiac Academy series and the characters do feel distinctively different. It really does draw the mystery out, to the point where you still don’t know what happened by the end of book 1 but not in a way that feels rubbish or full of plot-filler delays.

I’m definitely going to keep listening/ reading this series, but I won’t keep doing a review for every single book, so the next one you’ll see on this series will be a wrap up of the whole thing most likely!