Review Tuesday: Dark Hearts Aflame by Amber Daulton -- #DarkRomance #RomanticSuspense #ReviewTuesday

Dark Hearts Aflame by Amber Daulton

Daulton Publishing, 2025

Carmen Lozano has managed to escape from her savagely abusive husband and the drug-lord father who bartered her to that beast. Hiding out south of the border, she joins a home-grown resistance organization, protecting the populace from the local mob. For Carmen it’s a way to balance the scales, making amends for all the damage done by her cartel family.

After a decade as a Mafia capo, Bristol Rieger, aka the notorious Thorn, has blood on his hands and on his conscience. Guilt and self-disgust finally lead him to collaborate with the law, betraying the secrets of the Onyx organization in order to bring them to justice. Now he needs to disappear; if he’s found, his former associates will slaughter him without a thought, while the Feds aren’t likely to protect an inconvenient informer.

Chance brings Carmen and Bristol together in Mexico. Suspicious of one another at first, they soon surrender to a fierce attraction that burns all the brighter in the face of danger. Carmen’s vindictive ex will do anything to find her and punish her for spurning him. Before long, the pair are on the run, hoping against hope to find a place of peace. But how can two people whose histories are so burdened with cruelty and crime ever out-run their pasts?

Amber Daulton’s Dark Hearts Aflame is appropriately billed as a “dark romance”. The protagonists’ passion, hot enough to sear their souls, flares against the shadow of unrelenting threat. Violence rips the pages apart, violence perpetrated not only against Carmen and Bristol but by them as well. When Bristol first recognizes Carmen, she pulls her knife on him. Later in the book, Bristol, embodying his alter-ego Thorn, methodically undertakes the torture of several enemies. The author makes us see how these two individuals are forever marked by the horrors they’ve witnessed or inflicted.

Carmen is clever, resourceful, physically strong and astoundingly brave. Self-confident, even cocky, she knows how to excite desire. His reflexes honed by years of mob training, Bristol believes he’s always in control. He’s blind-sided by the need he feels for Carmen. I loved the complexity and contradictions in these characters. Although I have not ever (knowingly) met anyone from the Mafia, I found Carmen and Bristol surprisingly realistic. For much of the novel, they are at cross-purposes, and neither is likely to surrender. Still, each will fight to the death to protect the other.

“Mafia romance” is a popular sub-genre these days, one that I generally avoid. My perusal of blurbs and excerpts suggests that these books often glamorize or glorify mob life, as well as skirting the line when it comes to sexual consent. Given the destruction wrought by organized crime, I’m not very comfortable pretending it’s sexy.

Dark Hearts Aflame seems to offer a more realistic perspective on the alliances and compromises involved in cartel life. The Lozanos we meet are responsible for a lot of evil, but they’re not cardboard villains. Meanwhile, Carmen’s and Bristol’s struggles illustrate how difficult it is to extricate oneself from the clutches of this sort of organization.

Though the violence occasionally bothered me, overall I found Dark Hearts Aflame to be engaging and arousing. My one complaint was that I really could not follow the details of the different criminal organizations. Bristol apparently was part of Onyx, yet he was trained by Carmen’s brutal father, the head of the Lozano cartel. What was the relationship between the two? I never did figure this out. The fact that many of the mob characters have multiple names (Bristol versus Thorn, Jorge versus El Tren, Ruben versus Duque) didn’t help matters any. There were also unexplained references to events and characters who (I think) come from other novels.

This didn’t prevent me from savoring the love story, but I did find the confusion a bit distracting.

In fact I made similar comments about the last Amber Daulton book I reviewed. Perhaps the author might consider providing a list of the dramatic personae at the start of each book and/or a time line of past events that influence the current story. I think this would have helped me appreciate this book even more.

All and all, though, Dark Hearts Aflame delivers everything it promises: indestructible love and incandescent passion, dark regret and bright redemption.