Kill to Love (Hearts & Heathens, Book 1), by Penny Sunday | Free Audiobook
A girl with no feelings, a ten-day death match, and a serial killer in sunglasses
Delphine De Astor has a problem nobody can fix with kindness: she has never cried, she barely feels anything, and in her world that makes her Soulless, which is a diagnosis and a death sentence at once. She has spent her life performing normal, waiting for the moment her heart would go looking for its Soulmate, and that moment has not arrived. So the state does what it does with people it cannot place, and drops her into an arena.
The Execution Battle lasts ten days, is televised, and asks its contestants to kill each other while the adverts run. Delphine goes in without trousers and with no weapon beyond a bottle of sunscreen, which tells you most of what you need to know about the tone, and immediately meets a parade of people who are worse than the situation. Then she runs into Dig, a serial killer in heart-shaped sunglasses who once tried to take her and has been looking for her since, and the thing that has never happened to her finally does.
This book is a tonal gamble from the first minute: a televised death match, a heroine who cannot feel, a serial killer in novelty sunglasses, and advert breaks for stain remover in the middle of the slaughter. It should collapse under its own cleverness and it does not, because Penny Sunday commits completely. Annabelle Tudor plays Delphine with a flat, almost clinical calm that makes the jokes land harder, and Jacob Morgan as Dig has the hardest job in the cast, which is to be genuinely frightening and genuinely funny in the same line.
Delphine is the reason the comedy works. She is not quippy, she is literal: she has no emotional vocabulary, so she narrates her own situation with the detachment of someone filing a report, and the dissonance between that voice and what is happening around her is the engine of the whole thing. When her heart reacts to Dig for the first time, the book earns the moment because it has spent hours establishing what it costs her to feel nothing.
The world-building is thinner than the premise deserves, and in this kind of book that is fine. We get enough to understand the rules of the Battle, the caste logic of Soulmate versus Soulless, and the media machine around it, and not one scene more. It keeps the runtime at eight and a half hours and keeps the plot moving, which for a dark rom-com is the right trade.
The three-voice production is used well, with Dig's chapters giving you a second angle on events Delphine reports from inside her own head. Dominic Gruenewald's sections are the shortest and the most unsettling, and the switches are clean. There is a full cast behind the leads and the crowd scenes in the arena sound chaotic in the way televised violence should sound.
What will divide people, and the rating spread shows it, is the humour. This is a book that puts cannibals, psychopaths and a man in a pink sequined crop top next to a woman being hunted for sport, and if the tone does not land for you it will read as glib rather than funny. A minority of listeners land at three stars or below, and I understand why: the tonal swing is constant and there is no scene where the book lets you settle. I laughed more than I expected to, and I would still not call it a comfortable read.
For the right listener it is one of the most fun things out this year, and it goes well past what the cover promises. If you liked the recent wave of dark romantic comedies with a high body count, this is squarely in that lane. The site has more dark romance, Vicious Prince and The Daddy's Girl, if you want to keep going after this one.
Kill to Love is the first book in the Hearts & Heathens series: Delphine De Astor has never cried and never felt her heart search for a Soulmate, so she is classified as Soulless and thrown into a televised ten-day Execution Battle, armed with sunscreen and not much else. Then she meets Dig, a serial killer in heart-shaped sunglasses who once tried to kidnap her, and her heart finally beats. Eight hours and thirty-one minutes, narrated by Annabelle Tudor, Dominic Gruenewald and Jacob Morgan.
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Eight and a half hours is a good length for something this fast, and the multi-narrator production keeps the two points of view distinct without turning it into a play. It is a dark romantic comedy rather than a romance with jokes, so go in expecting gore, absurdity and a body count. If that sentence appeals, this is a very easy recommendation.
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