Kill to Love by Penny Sunday: A Book Review

A televised death match. A serial killer with a crush. And a protagonist who has never once cried. Kill to Love is completely unhinged, and that’s the entire point.

Penny Sunday is an Australian author, and as a fellow Australian, there’s something particularly fun about watching one of our own cook up something this chaotic. She writes under a pseudonym, which she’s explained with characteristic deadpan: after the research she did for this book, she suspected the government was watching her.

Her path to publication is another self-publishing-to-traditional story, a route that’s increasingly familiar in many of the reviews I’ve done. Sunday self-published Kill to Love, and it climbed Amazon’s charts fast enough to trigger a two-book auction with five bidders. Hachette Australia won global rights, the same journey we’ve seen from authors like Brynne Weaver, Raven Kennedy, Chloe Walsh, Keri Lake, and Penelope Douglas. It’s worth noting that Brynne Weaver’s Butcher & Blackbird is also one of Penny Sunday’s own favourite books.

Synopsis

Delphine De Astor has spent her whole life hiding a dangerous secret: she feels almost nothing. In a society built around soulmates and emotional connection, being “Soulless” is a death sentence, literally. When Delphine fails to find her match, she’s condemned to the Execution Battle, a televised ten-day fight to the death against other Soulless. There she comes face to face with Dig Graves (fabulous names in this book), a dark-haired, heart-shaped-sunglass-wearing serial killer who once tried to kidnap her and now hunts her through the arena with unsettling focus. The story is a dystopian dark romantic comedy, leaning hard into both dark romance and comedy.

My Review

Kill to Love is not a book to take seriously. This is camp, and it commits to the bit completely. The story is absurd, the stakes are ridiculous, and the banter between Delphine and Dig is the kind of over-the-top fun that works when you stop trying to apply logic to it.

For me, this one was carried almost entirely by the audiobook performances. The production is a full-cast duet. Jacob Morgan voices Dig, Annabelle Tudor voices Delphine. Morgan is a narrator I’ll listen to in almost anything, and there’s something about the idea of his voice under a hood and heart-shaped sunglasses that is embarrassingly effective on me. If I’d been reading this as a paperback, I suspect I might have DNF’d it. As an audiobook, I stayed for the voices.

This book never pretends to be anything other than what it is: a ridiculous, spicy good time.

What I Liked / What I Didn’t

What I liked

Jacob Morgan. The comedic timing in this audiobook is excellent across the board, Morgan and Tudor have great chemistry. The banter between the FMC and MMC is sharp and funny, and the premise is inventive enough to keep things interesting. 

What I didn’t

The hyperbolic nonsense of the storyline. 

Final Verdict

Kill to Love is exactly the kind of book that works better as an audiobook. The writing is fun, the premise is wild, and the performances elevate it. It’s camp, it’s spicy, it’s over the top, and it asks us to go along for the ride.

If you’re an audiobook person, start there.