Scythe & Sparrow

Content Warning: This section of the guide references graphic violence.

Scythe & Sparrow is the third and final installment of the Ruinous Love trilogy. The three novels in the series—Butcher & Blackbird (2023), Leather & Lark (2024), and Scythe & Sparrow (2025)—trace the respective stories of the three Kane brothers—Rowan, Lachlan, and Fionn. All three novels are works of contemporary romance and fall under the dark romance subgenre.

Butcher & Blackbird follows Rowan’s story as he falls in love with Sloane. Like all of the novels in the trilogy, Butcher & Blackbird is told from the two protagonists’ alternating first-person perspectives. Both serial killers, Rowan and Sloane are devoted to eliminating other serial killers, and they soon participate in a competition with each other, racing to kill specific targets. Their violent games incite conflict and complicate the parameters of their developing romance. Key aspects of Rowan and Sloane’s romance intersect with Lachlan and Lark’s and Fionn and Rose Evans’s concurrent romances. Likewise, Rowan’s brothers and their love interests are secondary characters in Butcher & Blackbird. Weaver fleshes out their stories in the subsequent two novels.

The series’ second novel, Leather & Lark, focuses on Lachlan and Lark’s enemies-to-lovers romance. The two meet under tense circumstances; in the course of his work as a contract killer for the dangerous Leander Mayes, Lachlan kidnaps Lark, triggering her childhood trauma and igniting her hatred for him. However, as their paths cross repeatedly over the following months, they begin to develop feelings for one another. Lark is close friends with Sloane and also develops a friendship with Rose, and these connections help her to navigate her complicated feelings for Lachlan. Like Rowan and Sloane, Lark and Lachlan overcome a range of obstacles, defeat villains, and fall in love by the novel’s end.

Scythe & Sparrow follows Fionn and Rose’s love affair and fills in the details of their stories, which are only hinted at in the series’ first two books. While Rose and Fionn act as peripheral characters in Butcher & Blackbird and Leather & Lark, they are the protagonists of the series’ final installment. This novel closes out the series by clarifying several lingering mysteries and providing happily-ever-after endings for all of the Kane brothers and their partners. The novel’s first epilogue therefore depicts Fionn, Rose, Rowan, Sloane, Lachlan, and Lark reuniting at a cabin in the woods, and the ensuing scenes prove that they have all made amends and are building a life together as a family and a community.

Each of the three Ruinous Love novels can act as a standalone narrative, but they are all part of the same world, and they share a variety of recurrent characters and thematic crossovers. For example, the scene from Butcher & Blackbird in which Rowan and Sloane visit Hartford, Nebraska to enlist Fionn’s help with Sloane’s shoulder injury also recurs in Scythe & Sparrow. The first introduction of the scene in Butcher & Blackbird depicts the visit from Rowan and Sloane’s perspectives, while its reappearance in Scythe & Sparrow depicts the visit from Fionn and Rose’s perspectives. The author uses these strategic narrative overlaps to emphasize the connections between the characters and their entangled experiences.

With its focus on morally ambiguous characters and implicit acceptance of casual violence, Weaver’s Ruinous Love trilogy mirrors the styles of other contemporary dark romances such as Parker S. Huntington and L.J. Shen’s Dark Prince Road series, which consists of My Dark Romeo (2023), My Dark Prince (2024), and My Dark Desire (2025), as well as Penelope Douglas’s novels Corrupt (2015), Credence (2017), and Birthday Girl (2018). Like Weaver, Huntington, Shen, and Douglas habitually combine elements of romance and erotica with narratives of violence and trauma to tell complex, action-packed love stories that both embrace and subvert conventional romance tropes.