The Butcher

Reviews

• Cenigh

  Finished June 28, 2025

  It was labeled as a mafia book, but I felt it really didn't fit that category well, at least for the first book. It is a unique plot, I will give it that, though it had potential, it didn't live up to it, and relied heavily on smut rather than plot. It begins with Fleur leaving her husband because she finds out he cheated on her. She is working at a bar and Bastian walks in and bam, insta-lust on both their parts. Unfortunately, it felt the relationship didn't evolve much outside of the physical. Bastian didn't display the main characteristics you usually have from a mafia MMC (the ott jealous, possessive, obsessive, protective traits that I eat up, in the last few pages, we may be seeing a little of that though). Fleur goes on ad nauseam for most of the book about her cheating husband, whom she is trying to get divorced from, and who is trying to get back together with her for a good portion of the book. I would have liked to see more focus on Bastian & Fleur building a relationship together instead of it being mostly about sex (which, while the first scene I thought was spicy, some of the wording they used to describe some of the scenes wasn't great. Bastian's way of speaking reminds me how an MMC would speak in an HR novel; his prose is sometimes a bit too flowery for who he is supposed to be in the story. The narrator for him was not a good fit, which might have been part of the issue for me as well. Also, there was not much butchering in this book at all, another case of show us he is a bad and dangerous man, not tell us. It doesn't end on a cliffhanger which is good.

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