As soon as I opened this book, I was hesitant. I found dozens of errors within the first few pages, which irks my editor & designer brain, but it was leant to me by a friend, so I powered my way through it.

Read: Jul. 6 – Jul. 11, 2025 *Self-published author(s)

Genre: Fantasy, Adventure, Hot/Spicy Romance
Audience: Adult
Book contains: alcoholism, death, murder, swearing, graphic sexual content, fire, prostitution, violence, stalking

Purchase a copy from Amazon.ca

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Not Ready for Publication

Allura is a Harbinger, a Ferrier of dead souls to the afterlife. She came into her powers at eighteen, and like all other Harbingers, was evicted from her family home out of fear. Now in her twenty-eighth year, Allura learns from Eadwulf, a knight, that the king has ordered the killing of all the Harbingers in the kingdom. Can she survive?

I’ll say it outright: I don’t enjoy graphic sexual content in books. That said, this book had a lot of it. Furthermore, despite being written by two women, the quality of this relationship truly read like “a man writing women.”

This book is structured quite interestingly, timeline-wise. It starts with a dream/flashback from ten years ago when Allura first awakened her powers, then continues with her as a nearly-twenty-eight-year-old. It jumps backward and forward in time a bit as the POV of each chapter (told in first person) switches between Allura, Ead, and a few other characters. The main plot is told mid-way through the beginning in a flashback, though I was wondering if it couldn’t be introduced earlier.

Since this is a self-published book with no current audiobook available, I read this the old-fashioned way. I did, however, speed-read through the sections of graphic sexual content, as they were plentiful but not really related to the overall plot.

I couldn’t really relate to any of the characters in this book. The two main characters were almost always thinking about sex, even in life-threatening situations, and the other characters each had their own obsessions that made them interesting but still somewhat shallow. I was, however, still able to differentiate between all the different characters quite easily, which sometimes isn’t the case when too many characters resemble one another too closely. D and B Sousa did well in making each of their characters unique.

I personally found the relationship very toxic. Of course, there’s sexual attraction there, but Allura is pretty starved for attention anyway, so any positive attention she gets is bound to draw her in. I hate that she and Ead slept together whilst so many horrible secrets were still between them; I dislike that he was stalking her in the beginning and invading personal space—it’s all points of what not to do in a proper relationship, written as a romance. Beyond that, I didn’t get much of a feel of them “getting closer” as the book progressed. It didn’t feel like they went beyond sexual attraction to anything substantial.

The writing itself is what I have the most problems with. It’s a self-published book, so I can give just a bit of leeway for quality (plus, my copy is from 2022, so I don’t know if newer versions exist) but it was so clear that these authors didn’t go through the correct publishing path for their book. It was not properly designed, not properly edited; I found between five and twenty spelling/grammar/design mistakes on each page. Overall, I do not believe that this book was anywhere near ready to be published yet. I can say that the premise is intriguing, but the execution was lacking.

The pacing of this book was actually quite good. It would go even faster without the gratuitous sex, which I suppose is meant to signify a deepening of the main characters’ relationship. This book could almost be its own standalone rather than the first of a trilogy, if not for the twist at the end; it leads nicely into a second book.

If this book gets a reprint with all the editing and design mistakes fixed, I would recommend it to lovers of dark spicy romance.

Related Reviews:

The Harbinger Trilogy Book 1: Harbinger Slain by D.B. Sousa
Mordred’s Curse Book 1: Mordred’s Curse by Ian McDowell