Review: Dark Poison - Bec Botefuhr/Bella Jewel

Review: Dark Poison - Book #1 Dark Brothers Series - Bec Botefuhr/Bella Jewel - March 2013

Scrolling through my Kindle the other night, I was in the mood for something older, something that felt like coming home. That's when I clicked on Dark Poison by Bec Botefuhr. The cover I remember is different from the one floating around now , mine was the self-published OG version, sitting on my Kindle since 2013, patiently waiting for me to fall back into it.

And fall back into it I did. Reading this book was like stepping into a time machine set to 2013, back when indie authors were just beginning to find their footing and the market hadn't yet been flooded with the endless sameness we see today. This was a world where writers released books because they had a story to tell, not because they were pumping them out on a conveyor belt like James Patterson. It was also a world before Fifty Shades of Grey changed everything, before dark romance and erotica fiction became the juggernaut genre it is now. Reading Dark Poison felt like reading history, the gentle, scrappy beginnings of a genre I now can't get enough of.

The story itself pulls no punches. We meet Willow, who thinks she's struck gold when a handsome stranger named Jagger offers to buy her a drink. She has no idea that this "meet cute" is actually a trap. Jagger kidnaps her, using her as bait to draw out a man she believed was long dead. Just when things start looking up for Willow and Jagger, the two nearly lose their lives, and as if that weren't enough, old flames resurface to complicate everything further. It becomes painfully clear that the universe has other plans for these two, and happiness might not be in the cards for either of them.

Can Jagger choose between Willow the woman he's fallen for and the woman from his past who's returned to reclaim a life that was cut tragically short? You'll have to read Dark Poison to find out.

More than just a story, this book is a reminder of what the literary world looked like before self-publishing became mainstream, before dark romance exploded into the genre we know today. For that nostalgia alone, it's worth the read and for the twisty, heart-wrenching romance inside, it's worth so much more as well as ending on a major cliffie.

Amazon: https://amzn.to/4vJ59yd