"I didn't gouge them out, Butcher. I plucked them. Delicately. Like a lady."
Main Characters
Rowan/Butcher - Middle brother of the Kanes. From Ireland. Lachlan and Rowan killed their dad after years of abuse. After helping kill his dad, he realized he really didn’t feel badly, so might as well kill the killers! Is a chef, owns a restaurant in Boston.
Sloane/Blackbird - After being sexually assaulted as a teenager, and finding out her best friend, Lark, was also sexually assaulted by the same teacher, she decides to take matters into her own hands and murders him. After finding out, she didn’t feel badly about it, she decides to start taking out the scum of the earth. Her thing is taking their eyeballs. She also weaves a complicated web behind her victims to try and tell the cops where their victims are, but the cops are clueless.
Lark - best friends with Sloane. She is a singer and we will find out way more about her in book two Leather and Lark.
Lachlan - Oldest Kane brother. He works for a man named Leander, who found the boys in Ireland shortly after they killed their dad. He brought them to the US and helped set them up a life here. Gave Lachlan a job, as a contract killer/cleaner/whatever Leander wants him to do. He also owns a leather shop where he makes shit out of leather.
Fionn - The youngest Kane brother. He is a doctor who lives not in Boston with everyone else. He is more of a free spirit and gets a lot of shit from his brothers for it.
Rose - Fionn’s “friend”. She has a broken leg, uses her crutches as a weapon, but also carries a huge ass knife. She works for the circus and is really funny/slightly crazy.
Sloane is a serial killer who kills serial killers, and pedophiles, and just general douchebags who are a stain on this world. She just finished one off, but she got locked in his dirty cellar.
She was stuck down there for a few days until another serial killer, who also likes to kill assholes, shows up to kill the guy Sloane already killed. Instead Rowan finds Sloane.
He lets her out of the cellar, takes her to get food, and proposes a game. Every August, they meet up, and make a competition out of killing bad guys. She agrees.
Fast forward one year later, Rowan’s brother Lachlan, texts both of them a location and doesn’t tell them who their target is. They are staying at this little inn, and they are the only ones there. The owner is an emo looking dude with a cat. It takes a few days, but they realize he is their target, when Rowan catches him in the walls watching Sloane. They chase him up to (what I imagine to be the creepy house that Norman Bates (movie Psycho lived in) his house.
Rowan catches him and before he literally beats him to death, he tells him that that girl he was watching, “she’s mine”.
Rowan and Sloane were already texting a little bit before their first game meeting. Afterwards, they text each other almost daily for nine months, until Sloane gets up the nerve to go to Boston (where Rowan lives). Rowan is a chef, and owns a restaurant, 3 in Coach. Sloane decides to just go eat some lunch. While she is there, she chickens out and doesn’t contact him. She is getting ready to leave when Rowan comes out and sees her. Sloane gets super awkward, Rowan asks her to stay but she refuses.
Clearly - Sloane and Rowan both like each other. Rowan is kind of more outward about showing it but Sloane is scared shitless and doesn’t know how to handle her feelings.
Rowan flies to Raleigh and pays some neighborhood kid to deliver groceries to her house. Then he calls her, acts like he’s home, and proceeds to talk her through cooking herself dinner. He does this for the next two nights. While they are on the phone, they talk. About everything and anything. Also, remember, he is watching her from outside her house, like a little creeper.
Time for the annual game. This time, they end up working together, even though that's not what Sloane had in mind. If you remember the trigger warnings, this is where the accidental cannibalism comes in. As the target is a cannibal and serves them human. Sloane knows better and doesn’t touch hers, or her drink. But Rowan has no idea. He drinks the wine, gets drugged, then just shovels in the food, while Sloane is trying to get his attention to stop. While drugged, and before passing out, Rowan admits he thinks Sloane is the most beautiful girl in the world, and Lachlan makes fun of him because he could hook up with any girl in Boston, but he has “taken a vow of abstinence over a girl who doesn’t want me”. Then passes out, in his plate, with human meat hanging out of it.
When he comes to, Sloane has the cannibal tied up and tells Rowan she had to scrape the food out of his mouth so he wouldn’t choke on it. After carving out the dudes eyes, she finishes him off.
The cannibal had a butler, who appears to have had a lobotomy. Sloane takes pity on him and asks Rowan to hire him in his restaurant in the kitchen as a dishwasher. While in the kitchen, the butler, David, is digging into some ice cream. Sloane looks at the tub, which is homemade, and weirdly enough has a label. The label states the ingredients: Cream, sugar, and “semen, milked April tenth to April thirteenth”.
Rowan agrees to take David home and let him work in the restaurant.
Fast forward eight months, Rowan has asked Sloane to Boston to attend a Best of Boston gala, where his restaurant has won an award. He tells Sloane she is the only one he can have real fun with. Sloane is finally ready to admit that she might want more from him. During the gala, they are dancing, and he asks her if she is ready to have some real fun, because there is a dude there that has killed a whole bunch of people and they can take him out. Sloane gets a little upset, and Rowan realizes that she had no idea he wanted to off someone tonight, she is there for real, for him.
But, then he gets a phone call from his restaurant, the pastry oven just blew up. Lots of weird, random, shit has been happening in his kitchen for the last few months. Rowan doesn’t understand what is going on, because it seems like everything that could go wrong, does. And he is currently trying to open up a second location so it's all real inconvenient.
Four months later, Annual Game Number 3. It's in a real sketchy location. Quick recap - dude be real bad, is currently killing someone, has a naked girl in the cellar. He ends up kicking Sloane straight in the face, dislocating her shoulder, and throwing her down in the cellar. Rowan gets her out of the cellar, admits to her that he can’t lose her, and then they kiss. Kinda making out while a serial killer is looking for them. Neither Rowan or Sloane get to kill him, because the dude dies of a heart attack after Sloane scares the shit out of him with his dead mother. Another Norman Bates situation. (If you haven’t watched Psycho, highly recommend).
Rowan takes Sloane to his brother, Fionn, who is a doctor. They meet Rose, she is staying with Fionn. She has a broken leg, whacks Rowan with her crutch, and when he wrestles that way from her, pulls a huge knife out of nowhere and threatens to stab Rowan in the balls.
Fionn eventually comes home, relocates Sloane’s shoulder, and gives her a sling.
That night, while staying in Fionn’s spare bedroom, Rowan and Sloane FINALLY get it on. About bloody time. It’s literally been four years.
After spending two straight weeks together, Sloane packs up her house in Raleigh and moves in permanently with Rowan in Boston. A few weeks later, Rowan's second restaurant, Butcher and Blackbird, opens. Rowan is super stressed with the new opening, plus all the shit that keeps going wrong at 3 in Coach.
One day, he makes some comment to Sloane about how he's barely handling everyday life with her, let alone worrying about her if they start up their annual game again. Sloane takes that as she is causing stress in his life, which is not what he meant. He apologies and they agree to meet at the restaurant later that afternoon. When Rowan arrives at 3 in Coach, David (remember lobotomy boy?) is there. Rowan is like wtf, why aren’t you at the group home. Rowan leaves the room for a second, comes back, and someone is holding a gun to his head. Spoiler alert - it's David. He isn’t lobotomized after all. Sloane walks in, and David tells Rowan to get rid of her, or he’ll kill her and make Rowan watch.
So Rowan says some real mean shit to Sloane because he doesn’t just want her to leave the restaurant, he wants her to flee town. He does give her a hint of why he is doing this, some comment about a date in April, sometime between the tenth and thirteenth. She leaves, crying. Calls Lark, and as she is talking to her about what Rowan says, she realizes some of the shit he said doesn't make any sense. Then she remembers - the dates he said - was on the ice cream. That David was eating. She calls Lachlan and says she needs backup, and she heads back to the restaurant.
David has Rowan tied up, and has sliced off some of his forearm….and ate it. Then stabbed him with a corkscrew and is drinking his blood. Sloane comes in, and acts like she is on David’s side. He believes her, and thinks they are going to go on a murder spree together, until she stabs him in the throat. Rowan apologies repeatedly for saying the most hurtful things he could but that he wanted her to get away because he didn’t want David to hurt her.
Fast forward, I don’t know how long, and Rowan and Sloane have just knocked off some other murderer. Sloane has plucked his eyeballs out and Rowan is giving her shit that one of her holes is rough looking. When she investigates, she sees something rolled up in there. When she pulls it out, it's a note and a ring. Rowan is asking her to marry him….with a ring that he stuck in a dead dudes eye socket….Of course she says yes.
In the bonus chapter, Rowan and Sloane get married. With only a few close friends and Rowan’s brothers. Lachlan walks Sloane down the aisle.
A few things that matter for book 2:
Sloane and gang are late showing up for Butcher and Blackbird opening night. Sloane tells Rowan that it's Lachlan and Lark’s fault, she thinks they hooked up, but also they seem to hate each other so she is confused.
Sloane asks Lachlan to help Lark move into her new place in Boston because Sloane will be out of town. He begrudgingly agrees.
The last chapter is called The Phantom. Some dude is watching Rowan and Sloane and says that Rowan killed his brother, so he plans to kill Rowan’s brother. And also rambles on a lot of religious shite. (Yes, shit with an E, because the Kane boys are Irish afterall).
Book 2, Leather and Lark, summary coming soon…