Since I loved the first book in this duology by Victoria Schwab, I couldn’t help but get the audiobook from my library when I was between audiobooks. The narrator does an excellent job and I highly recommend you check it out if you’re into audiobooks.
It picks up 6 months after the first book left off. Kate is living in another city where monsters still exist, but are so rare that most people believe the stories of monsters are part of some sort of conspiracy.
Kate doesn’t really believe in having friends and starts off as a lone fighter, but finds herself drawn into a group of friends who are also trying to fight monsters, but don’t really know what they’re doing. By the time this book starts it seems like they’re mostly gathering intelligence while Kate is doing the actual fighting. Even though she doesn’t want to admit they’re friends, she obviously cares about them and they care about her. One of them even lets her crash in his apartment.
Then they encounter a new kind of monster.
Instead of killing people, this monster taps into people’s rage and makes them kill each other.
No one has more rage than Kate, so when she comes in contact with the monster, it recognizes a kindred spirit and decides not to kill her.
But they have a connection and Kate figures that can’t be a good thing. In addition to allowing the monster to track her, it also means Kate is probably the only one who can track down this monster and hopefully kill it, so she sets out to do just that. When she senses the monster is headed towards Verity, she decides it’s time to head back home.
Meanwhile, back in Verity, August has replaced his broken wooden violin with a much sturdier steel violin and the bow doubles as a sword, which definitely comes in handy.
He also has a new sibling, Sorrow, although I can’t remember if it’s ever explained what happened to bring them into existence. Unlike August, who is trying so hard to be human, the new Sunai defines themselves as Sunai. When August asks if they identify as male or female, they don’t appear to understand the question since they identify only as Sunai.
Sorrow sees everything in black and white. Sinners deserve to die, the innocent deserve to live. Period. End of discussion.
August, for his part, has grown resigned to his fate as a Sunai and is no longer trying so hard to be human.
After Harker’s death, there was no one to stop the monsters from killing all the humans on the south side of Verity, so they’re all flooding to the North to get protection from Flynn, but Flynn isn’t letting just anyone in.
First, groups of people are gathered together and August plays his violin. Anyone whose soul glows red is ended. August is no longer the starving teenager consuming souls only when he has to. He is now well fed and strong.
Meanwhile, on the south side of Verity, it turns out Sloan isn’t dead after all. When Kate killed that man in the first book, her act of violence created a Malchai who looks eerily like Kate and has taken the name Alice (which happens to be Kate’s mother’s name.) Alice pulled the stake out of Sloan’s heart in time to save him.
Sloan is trying to rebuild Harker’s empire in his own image, and when he learns of this new kind of monster, he hatches a plan to capture it and use it for his own purposes.
Of course once Kate manages to get inside Verity she and August manage to find each other and she tells him about the new monster. They team up to defeat it, and to know how that goes, you have to read the book. You won’t be disappointed.