Serpent & Dove Review: Witch Hunter, Meet Witch, Chaos

The Enemies-to-Lovers Marriage Plot That Actually Earns Its Tension

I went into “Serpent & Dove” fully braced for another “spicy witch romance” that’s all vibes and no follow-through, and instead got smacked with a book that knows exactly what kind of fun it wants to have and commits to it with a straight face. Lou is a witch on the run from her coven. Reid is a witch hunter sworn to burn people like her. A dumb stunt at a festival forces them into a marriage of convenience. Yes, it’s a premise you’ve seen before. No, I did not care, because the execution is genuinely good.

Lou and Reid: Chaos Gremlin Meets Uptight Zealot

The dual POV is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and it works. Lou is sharp-tongued, self-protective, and constantly one bad decision away from getting them both killed, but she’s never written as reckless just for plot convenience — her chaos always comes from somewhere real. Reid, meanwhile, is the rare “devout, rule-following soldier” love interest who isn’t insufferable, because Mahurin actually lets his worldview crack under pressure instead of having him conveniently abandon his beliefs the second Lou bats her eyes at him. Watching two people who are supposed to hate each other on principle slowly realize the principle is the problem is the whole appeal, and it’s paced better than most books attempting this exact trope.

The Marriage-of-Convenience Slow Burn

This is where the book shines. The forced proximity, the fake domesticity, the way every small kindness lands like a grenade because neither of them wants to feel it — it’s genre comfort food done with real craft. The banter has bite instead of being cute for cute’s sake, and the tension builds through actual conversation and conflict rather than just repeated descriptions of jawlines. If you’re a slow-burn purist who wants the burn to be earned scene by scene rather than declared in a single confession, this delivers.

Where It Sags: Worldbuilding and the Middle Third

Here’s the honest part. The world outside Lou and Reid’s relationship is thin. The magic system, the church’s politics, the coven hierarchy — it’s all sketched in broad strokes that mostly exist to create obstacles for the romance rather than feel lived-in on their own terms. I wanted more texture to the witch-hunting society and got mostly vibes and a handful of rules introduced exactly when the plot needed them. The middle third also drags. Once the initial marriage setup resolves, there’s a stretch of travel and repeated near-misses that feels like filler before the plot remembers where it’s going. It picks back up hard in the last quarter, but getting there takes patience.

The side cast is a mixed bag too — a few standouts who deserve their own spinoff, and a few who exist mostly to move Lou and Reid into the same room. Found-family energy is present but underbaked in book one; it reads more like set-up for the sequels than something fully paid off here.

The Verdict on the Discourse

This book got big during the height of the “spicy fantasy romance” TikTok wave, and I get why — it’s got the enemies-to-lovers marriage plot, the forbidden dynamic, the witch-hunter irony. But it’s not just hype riding a trend. The romance is genuinely well-built even when the world around it isn’t, and that’s worth being honest about in both directions.