Daggermouth

My Review

Thank you so much Scarlett Press for the ARC!

There are books that make you feel like you’ve been dropped into a pressure cooker, and Daggermouth is absolutely one of them.

H.M. Wolfe has built a dystopian world that is viscerally easy to hate: New Found Haven, a city carved into rings of privilege and poverty, ruled by a masked elite obsessed with control and surveillance. It’s the kind of regime that weaponises marriage, monitors every move, and crushes anyone who doesn’t fit neatly into its hierarchy of wealth. The worldbuilding is sharp and specific, and the oppressive atmosphere never lets up.

But the real engine of this book is Shadera and Greyson. This is not a watered-down enemies-to-lovers situation. These two actively try to kill each other, and they have deeply personal reasons to do so. Their forced marriage is less a romance premise and more a detonation waiting to happen: two morally grey people, each layered with different forms of trauma, locked together in a luxury apartment with nothing but vodka and seething tension. It’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith if both parties truly, deeply despised each other, and Wolfe commits to that enmity completely.

Shadera is feral and fierce, a mercenary who takes no prisoners and gives Greyson absolutely zero grace. Greyson is the tortured second son, all crumbling control and buried pain. I have emotional damage thinking about him, and I mean that as a compliment.

My only real wish is for a few more quieter moments between them; the relationship develops at a pace that left me wanting a bit more romantic depth before the ending launched into full chaos mode. That said, the final act absolutely delivered, and book two cannot come fast enough.

For anyone who wants their enemies-to-lovers dark, political, and unhinged: this one’s for you.