Listen...I ✨️devoured✨️ this duology in the same day. I was hooked. I loved the angst, the trauma, the instalove (50/50, there is history between characters), the plot twist, and minor twists throughout it. It would have easily been another 5 star like book one if it hadn't had the ending that it had. Even for a dark romance that ending didn't give the happy ever after like a romance is essentially meant to. Dark or not. Even if there was a next book planned and miraculously that ending was rectified, the points made at the end leave no room for it to even be a possibility. We had a 4 years later look at our characters, and my heart was shredded because there was truly no fixing it. What happened in the end didn't change the story. It was set to have the most satisfying close to our characters' story, and to be honest, it was unnecessarily entirely ruined. I praise what the author did overall, but damn. With that i would categorize it as a light af mystery-thriller with romance in it. Not a romance since that HEA truly wasn't whole like it could've been.