{"id":6751,"date":"2026-07-08T11:11:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T11:11:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6751"},"modified":"2026-07-08T11:11:00","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T11:11:00","slug":"ash-moon-and-brine-by-faeryn-leigh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=6751","title":{"rendered":"Ash, Moon, and Brine by Faeryn Leigh"},"content":{"rendered":"

A blood-soaked, slow-burn romantasy where alchemy, amnesia, and desire all ask the same question: what does it cost to become whole?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Faeryn Leigh\u2019s Ash, Moon, & Brine<\/em> opens with a woman making one terrible decision after another, which is also to say it opens with a woman being very, very human.<\/p>\n

Briara Moon is drunk, abandoned by her best friend on New Year\u2019s Eve, newly reckless, and trying to outrun the loneliness that stalked her long before we meet her. What starts as a night of dancing at Decadence in Denver turns into a public hookup, a ride with a near stranger, and then a stumble into something much worse: a double homicide staged with occult precision. There are bodies. There is blood. There are strange symbols, severed toes, sulfur, mercury, salt. By morning, Briara is not just a witness. She is the prime suspect.<\/p>\n

The first problem is that Briara insists she didn\u2019t kill anyone. The second is that she can only remember the last three years of her life.<\/p>\n

<\/span><\/p>\n

That missing past is the locked door at the center of Ash, Moon, & Brine<\/em>. Briara was found in Iceland in 2019 with no memory of who she was, where she came from, or how she got there. Since then, she\u2019s erected a life out of fragments: medical school ambitions, landscape photography, a tense friendship with the one person who claims to know who she used to be, and the stubborn refusal to let her amnesia define her. \u201cThe past can stay buried,\u201d <\/em><\/strong>she says. Bu it can\u2019t.<\/p>\n

Kyrian \u201cKy\u201d Asherton is an Interpol Occult Agent hiding his real work behind a more ordinary investigative cover. When Briara\u2019s case lands on his desk, he\u2019s still dealing with the fallout from a New Year\u2019s Eve fight with his girlfriend and a work life built around cases most people would dismiss as nonsense. He\u2019s skeptical at first, but the official version of the case doesn\u2019t hold cleanly. What looks damning on paper becomes stranger in practice. Too many pieces fit too neatly. Too much has been arranged to make one lost woman look monstrous.<\/p>\n

Leigh is strongest when she lets the occult elements operate as evidence: clues to test, patterns to follow, materials with meaning. This is a big, layered contemporary fantasy mystery, the kind of book that wants to hand readers a corkboard, a spool of red string, and a strong cup of coffee.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The central investigation moves through police reports, old conspiracies, occult research, archival rabbit holes, and the slow realization that the murders are tied to something much larger than one bloody alley in Denver. The alchemical materials are not window dressing. Mercury, sulfur, and salt become part of the book\u2019s structure, not just its aesthetic. Once Briara begins to understand the ritual as alchemy, the investigation opens outward in a satisfying way. The fantasy elements are strongest when they feel almost procedural, when magic has rules, evidence, patterns, and consequences.<\/p>\n

Briara is the novel\u2019s most immediately compelling character, and the book knows how much charge she brings to the page. She\u2019s prickly, suspicious, smart, reckless, and often funny in the dark way people are when they\u2019ve spent too long guarding themselves from pity. She can be exhausting, but she is exhausting for the right reasons. Her skepticism isn\u2019t a cute character quirk to prop up the plot. It\u2019s survival. She has no reliable access to her own history, and everyone who claims to know the truth has some reason to influence her. Leigh gives her a strong internal life: guilt, anger, jealousy, curiosity, fear, and a hard little pilot light of hope she would probably deny possessing.<\/p>\n

Kyrian works best as both foil and pressure point. He\u2019s trained, controlled, morally serious, and occasionally arrogant enough to need Briara\u2019s resistance. Their dynamic doesn\u2019t begin with intimacy, or even much goodwill. It\u2019s friction first, trust second, and attraction somewhere in the dangerous middle. The romantic heat in Ash, Moon, & Brine<\/em> is slow-burn rather than instantly indulgent. The book has sex and sexual frankness, but the real charge between Briara and Kyrian comes from reluctant reliance: the moment when two people who have excellent reasons not to trust anyone begin to become useful to each other.<\/p>\n

Leigh\u2019s prose is strongest when she lets atmosphere and character tension do the heavy lifting. There are vivid moments throughout: Briara in a dress \u201clike quicksilver,\u201d<\/em><\/strong> the blood-staged alley, the cold beauty of Iceland, the strange sterility of an asylum, the contrast between Denver\u2019s familiar streets and the older European spaces where the conspiracy first begins to widen. The book has a taste for the gothic without fully leaving the contemporary world behind. Its best descriptive passages understand that beauty is more interesting when it is contaminated by dread.<\/p>\n

The book is also, at times, overstuffed. Some scenes linger longer than they need to, and the exposition can get heavy, especially when characters explain histories, conspiracies, institutional structures, or magical theory in large blocks. There are also moments when the language tells us a character\u2019s emotion or quality more than once after the scene has already made the point. A tighter version of this novel might trust readers more and move with a cleaner blade. The ambition is admirable, but the pacing occasionally pays the price for that ambition.<\/p>\n

Still, the sprawl is also part of the appeal. Ash, Moon, & Brine<\/em> isn\u2019t trying to be a minimalist fantasy noir. It wants the big board: romance, murder, alchemy, hidden agencies, memory loss, ancient books, dangerous magic, family wounds, international pursuit, and enough unresolved emotional business to fuel a long series. For readers who like their fantasy mysteries dense, character-driven, and unabashedly dramatic, that scale will be a feature, not a flaw.<\/p>\n

This will especially appeal to readers who like the scholarly occult intrigue of Deborah Harkness\u2019s A Discovery of Witches<\/em>, the dark academic\/conspiratorial atmosphere of Leigh Bardugo\u2019s Ninth House<\/em>, and the long-game investigative tension of the Cormoran Strike books, with a stronger romantasy current running underneath. It may also work for readers who want paranormal romance with more procedural scaffolding, or mystery readers willing to follow the evidence into stranger rooms.<\/p>\n

At its heart, Ash, Moon, & Brine<\/em> is about transformation. Alchemy gives the book its symbols, but Briara gives it its ache. She is trying to find out what happened to her, yes, but she is also trying to decide whether the self she made after the break is less real than the self she lost. The murders matter. The magic matters. The romance matters. But the deepest question is quieter and more dangerous: if someone stole your past, would getting it back save you, or destroy the person you fought to become?<\/p>\n

The post Ash, Moon, and Brine by Faeryn Leigh<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A blood-soaked, slow-burn romantasy where alchemy, amnesia, and desire all ask the same question: what does it cost to become whole? Faeryn Leigh\u2019s Ash, Moon, & Brine opens with a woman making one terrible decision after another, which is also to say it opens with a woman being very, very human. Briara Moon is drunk, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6751","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6751"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6751"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6751\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6751"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6751"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6751"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}