Love is pain...but this is ridiculous!
I picked up The Love Trials for my book club reading thinking I was getting a thriller with a paranormal twist. What I got instead was emotional damage, psychological chaos, and a man out here turning relationships into horror games that make therapy look like a luxury spa day.
The setup is simple enough on paper (which is hilarious, because nothing about this book is simple). Serial killers don’t just die and stay gone. Instead, their ghosts come back, possess random everyday people, and keep right on killing until a specialist team can figure out what’s anchoring them to the world.
This particular case involves Morrow, a serial killer who died but clearly did not take “rest in peace” as a suggestion. He had been engaged, got dumped, and apparently decided that was not just a personal tragedy but a full-scale indictment of love itself. So naturally, he starts kidnapping couples and forcing them into “love trials.” And when I say trials, I do not mean trust falls or communication exercises. I mean things like: whichever of you pulls out the most of your own teeth with pliers gets to live. Romance is not dead. It’s just deeply unwell. And yes, it is as horrifying as it sounds.
The thing about this book is that it lives in that very specific space where you know you should probably stop reading, but your brain refuses to cooperate. I kept thinking, okay, I should take a break from this, and then immediately did not take a break from this. It’s a full “one more chapter” situation that somehow turns into half the book disappearing. I read it in two sittings and lost more sleep than I should have.
Strip away the romance, and what you’re left with is a genuinely mind-bending paranormal thriller. The idea that the “killer” is technically a possessed victim adds this uncomfortable moral layer where you’re not just chasing a monster, you’re also trying to save the person trapped by it. The possession element isn’t just a gimmick; it forces you to constantly question what’s real, who’s in control, and how far the team has to go to stop something that keeps changing hosts.
Morrow himself is particularly unsettling because his logic is so human at the core. Rejection, bitterness, and ego twisted into something absolute. His “love trials” aren’t random acts of violence. They’re structured, intentional, and designed to prove that love will fail under pressure. Which makes Nico and Eden’s storyline, once they start being honest with themselves and each other, feel like a long rebuttal to his entire worldview. He says love is fragile; they keep proving it’s stubborn.
And yes, I knew they were going to make it. This is book one in a series (Phantom Minds #1), so I wasn’t exactly clutching my pearls over their survival. But that didn’t make the journey any less intense. The question was never if they would get through it, but what it would cost them to do so.
I’ll admit, I could have done without the steamy scenes. They make sense in the context of targeting couples, but tonally it’s a bit like switching from “existential paranormal horror” to “romance montage” and then back again without warning. Slight whiplash.
Still, I couldn’t put it down. I didn’t want to stop. I just kept reading faster and faster, which is probably not the most rational response to a book involving ghost serial killers and pliers-based relationship tests, but here we are. So yes, it’s a train wreck. A brilliant, horrifying, slightly unhinged train wreck. And I absolutely loved it.
Now I just need book two. Immediately.
