Key Details
- Performance: A single credited voice, Kelli Tager, carrying a first-person protagonist across the whole run, with no second reader indicated anywhere on the page.
- What it covers: Enemies-to-lovers, slow burn, a deposed heir and a usurped throne, two Clans at war.
- Feel: Cold, furious, and slowly warming.
- Our call: Strong Clan intrigue with the romance deliberately held in reserve, so go in knowing it is half a story.
A coffin is where the story starts, which tells you most of what you need to know about the register Vera Raye is working in. This audiobook opens with its deposed heir waking inside one, after a Clan wedding the book calls the worst in Malhaven's history, to the news that a father is dead and an uncle now holds the throne. The sixteen hours that follow are spent clawing a way back toward it. Blackstone put the recording out in October 2025 with Kelli Tager credited as reader.
Nothing in the catalog record carries the one fact a buyer most needs. The listing files this as the third entry in The Curse of Silver Secrets and Cruel Shadows and stops there. The description says something quite different: this is book one of the second duology, with its own arc, and the author's own note claims each duology stands alone while recommending you take them in order anyway. Two incompatible pieces of guidance, sitting on the same page, about the one question that decides where a new listener starts.
As a structure it is efficient. A deposed heir, a usurping uncle, a frozen territory run by a commander the description calls a legend drenched in blood and shadows, and a forced alliance with the enemy Clan the heir was raised to hate. Slow-burn enemies-to-lovers, with the promise that banter is a love language and that the secret the Commander is keeping could break the continent. Nothing here is trying to surprise you with its shape, and nothing needs to be.
Patty Bice, five stars in early February 2026, gets closest to what the book is actually selling: mysteries woven all through the pages, and a cliffhanger waiting at the end. That is the right emphasis. The mystery engine does more work here than the romance, which is being held back on purpose for the duology's second half, and anyone arriving because the description promises the series only gets hotter should understand that this is a promise about later books.
What Vera Raye Gets Right
Vengeance gives the premise a shape that suits a long listen. Two Clans, the Protectorate and the Blood Brotherhood, are set against each other hard enough that the publisher runs a hashtag inviting listeners to pick a side. A protagonist who has lost a father, a throne and all bodily safety in a single night carries motive stacked high enough to fill sixteen hours without the plot having to keep inventing new reasons for the heir to move, which is exactly where long romantasy usually fails.
First person, and a voice that is furious from the opening line: that combination is what the format rewards. Fury is easy to hear and hard to fake on the page. The other structural promise, banter as a love language, is the single hardest thing to land in print and among the easiest to land aloud, because comic timing becomes a performance variable instead of a punctuation problem. A book built on those two registers is a book that gains something in the move to audio.
Shortest of anything in the pool, and the most quotable, is the response posted on February 7, 2026: strong storytelling, interesting characters, fine world building, strong plot. Four bare declaratives with no hedging at all, which in a corner of the market where enthusiasm usually arrives in paragraphs of capital letters reads as a considered grade rather than a reflex. Behind it sit 303 ratings and a displayed 4.5, an actual audience rather than a launch-week bump.
Where Vera Raye Loses Some Ground
Not a single one of the five responses on display says a word about the recording. Not the pacing of the reading, not the voice given to the Commander, not whether a first-person register holds across a book this size. Kelli Tager is credited and then goes entirely undiscussed, which across 303 ratings is unusual enough to name out loud. Anyone choosing the audio over the text is buying on the publisher's word alone, with no listener commentary on the page to lean on.
The pool also cannot agree on who this book is about. Claudia Hernandez, four stars in March 2026, is upset at having to wait for the conclusion of Allie and Ryker's story. The description names nobody at all, so a buyer has one given name from one response and no way to confirm it. The October advance-copy entry, posted twelve days after release, might settle the matter if it were not cut off mid-sentence and typeset in decorative characters that render as empty boxes on plenty of devices. It does at least leave a heat grade of three and a half on its own private scale, which is the only content note the page carries anywhere.
Kalysta, four stars in February 2026, reports a lot of typos and reads the book as written quickly. Typographical errors do not survive into a recording, so half of that complaint cannot follow the title into audio. The other half can. The same response finds this love story less grand and less consuming than Evie and Ryker's from the previous duology, and reads the author as less invested in this couple, which is a judgment about the writing that no reader can repair.
Should You Listen to A Dagger of Ice and Intrigue?
Romantasy listeners who want the fantasy half taken seriously are the target here. The Clan politics, the frozen territory, the succession dispute and the forced alliance are not decoration around a couple. They are the plot, and the couple is being assembled inside them. If you came to the genre through court intrigue rather than through heat level, the balance should suit you, and the length stops being a deterrent once the alliance gives the intrigue somewhere to go.
Cliffhanger-averse listeners should wait for the second book. This is the opening half of a duology rather than a self-contained story, whatever the standalone language on the page implies, and the ending stops rather than resolves. Anyone beginning the series here is also making a choice the listing actively obscures: the entry number says three, the description says book one, and only one of those two facts is any help when you are deciding what to buy first.
Come in knowing the ending is a door rather than a wall, and what comes before it is a well-built piece of Clan politics with a romance growing slowly inside it.
Good to Know
Does the fantasy or the romance carry more of this audiobook?
Fantasy first, by a clear margin. The succession dispute, the two Clans and the frozen northern territory occupy most of the running time, and the romance is built slowly inside them rather than driving them. The description supports that reading: a slow burn, an alliance made under duress, and a secret that threatens a continent rather than merely a relationship.
Does the audiobook work better in long sessions or shorter ones?
Shorter sittings suit it better at first. Clan names, titles and territories accumulate quickly through the opening third, and a story told entirely from inside one furious point of view rewards being taken in pieces. Once the alliance forms and the mystery takes over, the plot carries itself and longer sessions become much easier.
