Breakaway Books

Authored by Kristen Ciccarelli; Published 2024; Fantasy/Romance

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

Heartless Hunter has all the ingredients for an excellent romantasy novel, but to me, it just felt like a set-up to a far more intriguing sequel.

In Heartless Hunter, Rune Winters leads a double life: brainless heiress-socialite by day, loyal to the New Republic; rebel Crimson Moth by night, a vigilante liberating all the witches she can. But there is one witch she hasn’t been able to find, Seraphine Oakes, a dear friend of her deceased grandmother. In order to get to Seraphine before she’s executed, Rune has to get inside intel on where she’s being held, and the best source appears to be Gideon Sharpe, brother of her best friend Alex—and expert witch Hunter. Nevertheless, Rune is determined to seduce him even as Gideon closes in on the Crimson Moth. 

The type of cat-and-mouse game that this premise lends itself to can be filled with suspense, but I don’t think this novel quite got there. Because the audience knows from the beginning that both Gideon and Rune are attempting to play each other rather than genuinely courting, much of the tension drains out of it. I would have been far more intrigued if the author had left us with doubts as to Gideon’s intentions from the very beginning—in this case, the point of view continually shifting between Gideon and Rune gave me too much information. Instead of wondering if Gideon’s feelings were real, I knew that he was doing whatever he had to in order to determine if Rune was a witch, and it made the whole process less fun for me. A slower, less linear build-up of their suspicions or their romantic relationship could have made for a much more suspenseful novel. 

That being said, I can’t help but feel like the follow-up to this novel will be excellent. The author resisted tying up the plot lines in a nice bow at the end of this one; if anything, it’s much more of a mess than it was at the beginning. Rune’s relationships with both Alex and Gideon have twisted into a dramatic and painful triangle of sorts, and her view of what is right and wrong has been turned on its head. I have a feeling that in the next novel, she’ll be a very different, very conflicted type of hero. Heartless Hunter ends with the beginning of a revolution, and it is not at all clear what role Rune will play in it or what will happen to the New Republic. On the romance front, I have no idea if she can recover the passion that she had with Gideon, but if she can, it’ll be a fascinating journey to get there.

Heartless Hunter was not the best romantasy novel I’ve read recently, but the next novel holds a lot of promise!