The 2024 ILVN Reading Challenge has twelve prompts, and we’re completing one prompt a month, like we did last year. And I’m excited to talk about what I read in March for this challenge.

I bought this book at the end of last year, and March seemed like the perfect time to read it. Completing the Royalty prompt, I read: Rhapsodic by Laura Thalassa, which is a slow burn, second chance fantasy romance that sucked me in straight away.

We have an innocent young girl abused by her stepfather due to her siren power. When she finally stands up for herself, the night ends with her killing the man in self defense and calling the Bargainer to help her clean it up.

Now, here is where the world building truly grabs me. The Bargainer trades favors for favors, and they’re not the good kind. When he cashes them in, the recipient is usually dead. It’s magnificently violent and ugly. And the man is beautiful darkness. 

Can you see the cues for the bad boy trope? The one where he’s willing to hurt everyone but her? You got it.

But oh, Miss Thalassa does a great job of building the tension between these characters by alternating from the past, when he saved her on more than one level, to the present, when he’s finally returned to her life after seven years. (Oh, if I could only tell you the reason for this because it is FANTASTIC).

If it’s not obvious yet, I gave this book five stars, bought the series set, and devoured book two immediately after finishing Rhapsodic. Des, aka the Bargainer, is my new book honey, and he’s just the way I like them: dangerous, deadly, sarcastic, and sweet. The way he is with Callie, our protagonist, is so obviously caring and full of love.

And Callie is a mess. I mean, the kind of mess that I understand and enjoy in a character, but her life is chaos. She can’t help it, that kind of energy is attracted to sirens, but Callie makes it work as a private detective with her best friend, able to glamor people with her voice and make them tell the truth, to do or not do things that she orders them to do. This works in her favor, of course, as she gets stalkers to stop terrorizing their victims or forces asshole sons to return their ailing mother’s life savings.

Then, throw in an alpha wolf boyfriend that works for the government, and the mess only gets bigger.

But Des isn’t clean in all of this. His life is an utter mess, too. He’s the king of the night, and he has a mystery to solve. Someone in the fae kingdom is kidnapping female warriors, impregnating them, and returning them in coffins, comatose with the offspring. Male warriors have gone missing, too, without return.

Des wants Callie to help him solve the mystery as we watch them get closer during their past.

This book is an excellent set up for the series with unique and interesting characters, and one hell of a burning romance. Oh, the tension! These two are fire!

I can’t really give you much more in the way of details without spoiling the parts of the story that I found so interesting, so please, go check this series out!

Let me know if you’ve read anything by Laura Thalassa in the comments below, and don’t forget to tag us at @ILoveVampireNovels to share your pick for this month’s reading challenge.