Book 1 in the Starlight Grove series Reviewed by CJ | Rating: 4/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥 📖 Physical
⚠️ This is a full spoiler review. If you haven’t read Across the Vanishing Sky yet — go read it first. We’ll be here when you’re done.
Not ready for spoilers yet? Go read the tame version on Plot Approved first. We’ll wait. 😄 Read the spoiler free version
OPENING HOOK
I picked this up not expecting so much emotional depth, but I was surprised in the best way. This is a small town thriller that blends found family with romance while following an underlying missing persons mysetery. It sounds like it should be complicated, but I found it extremely easy to read and becaome invested in. I started it one day and finished it the next, helpless to put it down.
THE FULL STORY — SPOILERS INCLUDED
Okay so here’s the setup: Brae (Full name Braedyn) moves to Starlight Grove chasing the one lead she refuses to let go of. Her childhood best friend and soul sister, Nova, vanished into thin air on a girls’ weekend hiking Three Creeks Canyon just feet away from her. Brae looked away for two minutes to get a picture of some wildflowers, turned back around, and Nova was just… gone. No trace. They’d left Brae’s eight-year-old son Owen at home (she and Nova had been raising him together) so she eventually had to leave, but when the official search wound down and they told her there was nothing more they could do, Brae could not let it go. So she packed up both their lives and moved to Starlight Grove to keep looking, long after everyone else had given up.
And that’s where she runs into Dex Archer. The Archer boys are basically the backbone of this whole series — Wylder, Kol, Orion, Dex, and Maverick, — and their backstory is brutal. Their father was a serial killer and when two of the brothers found his trophy box of victim trinkets, he lost it and started beating them. Orion (the middle child and only fifteen at the time) had to kill him to stop him from killing his brothers. So these five boys, ages eleven to eighteen at the time, were carted off to Starlight Grove to be raised by their great-uncle Waylon, who is as eccentric as he is supportinve and kind. There’s a house with an oak tree growing up through the middle of it, and a lot of wide open space for everyone to just be without having to pretend. It was the kind of chaotic, warm-hearted wild that’s perfect for five traumatized boys to heal in. Owen adores it too, especially with another kid (Kol’s daughter Skyler), and animals around, and he just fits right into all the weird like he was meant to be there all along.
Brae gets folded into the family slowly, gets closer to Dex, and meanwhile the case cracks open. Nova’s disappearance was never isolated, it turns out. There’s a whole pattern of missing women, and it eventually traces back to Deputy Travis Moore. Sheriff Miller is useless, completely out of his depth, and Travis has been positioning himself inside every investigation and every search party the entire time, because watching these families break is where he gets his thrill. It gets worse, because Travis’s fiancée Cora works at Wylder’s bar with Brae and is in the same missing-persons support group, so Travis has been feeding off of every scrap of information Cora brings home, even tagging along to the group more often than not. Having Brae working right there at the bar where they all eat and he can see the tomrment every single day was everything he wanted. With Brae moving to town, he could now torment her on a loop — Nova’s jewelry showing up, bloodstained clothing, a recording of Nova’s voice taunting her. He was a monster every step of the way.
We eventually find out that the brothers run something called the Hourglass Network on the side — an off-the-books operation, not exactly legal, using whatever skills and resources they have to try to bring answers home to families the system has failed. And it’s that network, plus Kol specifically, who never gave up, that ends up finding Nova alive at the very end, right as book one closes and book two picks up.
Brae and Dex do get their happy ending here. Owen adores him, Dex adores Owen right back, and for Brae that is huge. They were already all in love before Nova came home, but bringing her back cements it.
BEST PART OF THIS BOOK
The emotional depth. I’m not usually a big feelings kind of reader, but this one surprised me. The relationships are so well-built that even Orion, who barely says a word and only shows up to family dinners under heavy peer pressure, feels like a fully realized person. You feel the weight of what he did to save his brothers without the book having to spell it out constantly.
WORST PART OF THIS BOOK
Nothing bad here. It ran heavier emotionally than I’d normally reach for, but that ended up being a strength, not a weakness (it’s just not usually my go-to selection), and I still couldn’t put it down.
THE STEAM RATING BREAKDOWN
🔥🔥🔥🔥 Spicy. The romance between Brae and Dex is central to the book, not a side plot — it develops alongside the investigation and carries real emotion given everything both of them are carrying.
THE TWIST WE DIDN’T SEE COMING
Travis Moore being the one behind everything; using his badge and his access to every search party and every grieving family as his own personal supply line. That’s the gut-punch twist. And Cora unknowingly feeding him information the whole time makes it hit even harder. My heart just breaks for her, and I am hoping we see more of her story going forward into future books.
THE CHARACTER WE LOVED TO HATE
Travis Moore, easily. A cop who orchestrates the disappearance of others to torture them as he also tortures their families with pieces of their missing loved ones? Vile in the worst possible way.
THE ENDING — SATISFIED OR DISAPPOINTED?
Satisfied. Kol finding Nova alive right as the book closes is the perfect cliffhanger into book two and it answers the question the whole book was built on while leaving plenty to unpack next.
WOULD WE REREAD IT?
I think so. The emotional depth here is the kind you want to sit with again and the characters are easy to love.
WHO IS THIS FOR
Readers who want their romance wrapped around a thriller with found family, small-town secrets, morally-gray vigilante justice, and a spicy slow burn.
WHERE TO GET THIS BOOK
📖 Physical Book
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🎧 Audiobook
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📱 Ebook / Kindle Unlimited
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📚 More from the Starlight Grove series
- Book 1 — Across the Vanishing Sky | Reviewed by CJ | ⭐ 4/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
- Book 2 — Into the Fading Twilight | Reviewed by CJ | ⭐ 4/5 | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Ready for more reviews from CJ? Find More Here
Plot Twisted. 🔥 📖 | Series: Starlight Grove Book 1 | Genre: Romantic Thriller | Steam: 🔥🔥🔥🔥