Optimistic animal rescuer is kidnapped by cold-blooded amnesiac

This one's a banger and resolves a lot of the series' emotional themes.

Multiple POVs, 3rd person past tense, gritty Victorian era romance, medium spice, time jump, MCs are mid to late 30s

Prose is still a little edgelordy at times but the characters are given a lot of space to do act and feel. Lorelei starts really, really strong and the Rook unfurls throughout the book. They don't discuss what happened during the timejump, which feels odd, but there's a fun pirate story. It's a solid vengeance book. [Immediately after timejump]

A villain gets it early in a memorable way.

You can see Byrne starting to get a rhythm and develop as an author.

[Plot + relationship 90%]

It is one more Byrne book where we get a harrowing or life threatening situation that spurs one protagonist who "CAN'T LOVE BECAUSE HE'S SO BROKEN AND FEELINGS ARE SO HARD AND BAD AND WEAK" to realize they love the other protagonist because they almost saw them die.

[Ending]

Then they have sex and the book's over. Byrne's done this in 3 of the 4 other books of hers I've read. (Drama -> Attempted Murder -> ILY -> Sex -> "The End.") I guess the formula works, it just feels like the resolution on the "I CAN'T LOVE" drum these dudes bang gets weirdly rushed and we get a line of love dialogue instead of "oh yeah, I was shitty, I should fix that." We are forced to spend so many pages on that thread for "well, I guess if someone kills her, I'd be sad," to be the resolution.

As a style choice throughout this series to show how brutal these dudes are, Byrne uses otherizing language that feels weird in the historical context bc it was a tool of the colonizing entities at the time (stuff like "savage" or "inhuman" and calling them all different predatory animals.)

Sex scenes: nothing fancy, but well done. There is a closed door voyeur scene with a side character in a non main character POV that may have been the most interesting encounter.

Read Order: I think you could read Book 1, 2 and this one without missing too much. There's some cameoing and threads from the others, but 1 & 2 will get you the main beats.

Bird Nerd Gripes: A rook is not a raven. They're both black feathered corvids, but rooks are their own thing. They've got these dope bare spots by their grey beaks that make their beaks look pale and long.