The Poison Daughter
- NYT bestseller · 1 week on the list, peaked at #6
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Our view
“The Poison Daughter” is a dark, inventive romantasy whose heroine kills with a kiss. Sheila Masterson’s Harlow Carrenwell disposes of her family’s rivals for her parents and secretly punishes men who abuse women, until her new betrothed, Henry Havenwood, survives her kiss and learns the truth. Some readers enjoy the morally tangled heroine and the arranged-marriage tension, even if the book runs very long; others feel the twists pile up at the end.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Every person Harlow Carrenwell kisses dies immediately, and that’s the way she likes it. The poison-lipped youngest daughter of Lunameade’s magical founding family has used her power to annihilate their opposition. Her first husband is in the ground. Her new betrothed is next. But the merry widow has a secret. When she’s not acting as an assassin at her parents' whims, she moonlights as a vigilante for abused women in their walled-off city. Meet a man. Lure him in. Kill him with a kiss. Until one night Harlow kisses a mark and he doesn’t die. Worse, her invincible partner in passion is her new betrothed, Henry Havenwood, and now he knows about her double life. Instead of selling her out and bringing the rival families to blows, he does something much more sinister—whisks her away to wed in his wild mountain fort. Harlow doesn’t trust Henry, but the only way to protect her family and the city of Lunameade is to figure out what his family is planning. Cursed with a husband she can’t kill and trapped in a fort miles of vampire-infested woods from home, Harlow’s survival requires her to do the impossible: Make the man who knows she’s a killer fall in love with her anyway.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.3 across 104 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 41% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Fantasy average of 8.0. That is how 8.1 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardcover | 8.3 | 104 | 100% |
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
The same shelf — Fantasy — and a score of 8.1, the closest to this book.
