Quick Take
- Voice: Kelsey Navarro Foster handles Violet's first-person narration with energy and range - she distinguishes the three love interests vocally without overdoing characterization, and the dark comedy lands better than it would on the page.
- Big ideas: Why-choose romance, dark comedy, the violence of men turned protective force, class and survival
- Atmosphere: Chaotic and funny with genuine danger underneath
- Worth it?: Foster's performance makes Elle Thorpe's dark rom-com opener work as an audiobook in a way that rewards the genre's stranger tonal demands.
Violet's life in Saint View shifts from toilet-cleaning to kidnapping in the span of an opening chapter, and X's and O's, the first book in Elle Thorpe's Saint View Murder Squad trilogy, never really lets the protagonist - or the listener - stabilize from that point forward. This audiobook, narrated by Kelsey Navarro Foster and running just over ten hours, is the opening entry in a why-choose dark romance that pairs genuine menace with comedy so deadpan it arrives before you realize you're laughing. Thorpe has written a book that operates in a register most genre romance doesn't attempt: Murder Squad is exactly what it sounds like, and the humor is inseparable from the violence rather than a counterweight to it.
What Elle Thorpe Delivers
The premise requires some tolerance for internal logic that runs on its own terms. Violet is kidnapped, nearly killed, and then rescued by three men who form a secret brotherhood - Murder Squad - that kills predators the legal system can't touch. One of them, X, believes she is his wife due to circumstances the plot will clarify. Whip has a specific attitude toward virgins that the book treats as a character quirk rather than a red flag. Levi is the gentler option, connected to Violet through a year of prison correspondence that functions as the closest thing to a conventional romantic foundation in the book. The three are not interchangeable, and Thorpe builds each character with enough distinctiveness that Violet's parallel attachments feel earned rather than arbitrary.
What Thorpe does well is maintain the dark comedy without softening the stakes. The rhyming threats from a mystery antagonist - someone hunting the Murder Squad from the outside - create genuine narrative pressure rather than serving merely as a frame device for the romance arcs. Readers expecting pure reverse-harem fantasy with danger as decoration will find that X's and O's actually commits to the suspense. The identity of the antagonist and the shape of the threat develop across all three books of the trilogy, meaning this first volume ends with threads deliberately open.
What Elle Thorpe Gets Right
Kelsey Navarro Foster's narration is the argument for the audiobook over print. Dark rom-com as a subgenre lives and dies on tonal balance - too much darkness and it tips into something unpalatable, too much comedy and the menace deflates. Foster walks that line consistently well. Her Violet has a dry, slightly disbelieving quality that functions as the reader's proxy: a woman who cannot quite believe her own situation and is processing it with humor as a survival mechanism. X's humor, in particular - bad jokes delivered with bloodstained hands - requires a performer willing to commit to the absurdity without winking, and Foster does not wink.
One reviewer specifically called out the ice cream and omelet scenes as laugh-out-loud moments that balance the darker content, and those scenes do land in the audio performance because Foster times them with precision. The tonal shifts from threat to absurdity to genuine feeling happen quickly in Thorpe's prose, and audio rewards that pace in a way that silent reading sometimes can't - the transitions hit harder when a voice is delivering them in real time.
Where Elle Thorpe Loses Some Ground
The characterization of Levi, the prison pen-pal hero, is worth particular attention because he is doing something narratively different from X and Whip. Where those two operate primarily in physical presence and immediate danger, Levi's relationship with Violet is built on correspondence - on words, on the slow accumulation of an emotional connection across distance and bars. That asymmetry creates an interesting dynamic once all three men and Violet are in the same space, and Thorpe handles the transition from epistolary connection to embodied relationship with more care than the genre sometimes allows.
Listeners should note that X's and O's ends with active cliffhanger elements. This is explicitly book one of a trilogy, and several significant plot threads - particularly around the mystery antagonist and the full history of Levi's conviction - remain open. This is disclosed in the synopsis but worth confirming before starting: finishing this audiobook without the sequels immediately available will be frustrating for listeners who dislike unresolved endings.
The mystery element in X's and O's deserves more attention than genre reviews typically give it. The rhyming threats and the escalating external antagonist are not mere backdrop for the romance arcs - they drive the plot's pacing and create a structural reason for the Murder Squad to operate as a unit rather than as separate romantic options Violet can consider in sequence. Thorpe integrates the suspense and the romance more tightly than many why-choose novels manage, and that integration is audible in Everdeen's performance: the scenes where the external danger intersects with the romantic dynamics carry different energy than either type of scene alone, and Foster handles those tonal fusions with the commitment they require.
Elle Thorpe's handling of the plus-size heroine Violet deserves note as a distinct craft choice rather than a mere diversity marker. The explicit acknowledgment of Violet's body and the way the heroes respond to it is woven into the romance mechanics rather than treated as an obstacle to overcome or a point of anxiety to resolve. Whip's particular attention, X's physicality, Levi's description in letters of the person he imagines - all of these converge in ways that treat Violet's body as a source of attraction rather than complication. That's a specific authorial decision that operates differently than the default assumptions of the genre, and Foster's narration handles those passages without self-consciousness.
Who Should Pick Up X's and O's
Readers who have enjoyed dark romance in the mode of Penelope Douglas or who found themselves entertained by morally compromised heroes in why-choose fiction will find this delivers what the subgenre promises and then some. The plus-size heroine and the explicit acknowledgment of that in how the heroes respond to Violet is handled without condescension, which matters. Listeners who find dark comedy a contradiction in terms when the comedy involves murder will not be converted here. Anyone who dislikes cliffhanger endings and does not have the sequels ready should wait until the trilogy is complete before starting. Content-wise: adult themes, violence, explicit sexual content, and triggering themes are clearly flagged in the synopsis.
Does the X's and O's audiobook end on a cliffhanger?
Yes. This is explicitly the first book of a trilogy, and the mystery antagonist plot and several character backstories remain deliberately unresolved. The romantic dynamics also develop across all three books. Listeners who want a complete story arc in one audiobook should wait until they have access to the full Saint View Murder Squad trilogy.
What spice level should listeners expect from this audiobook?
High. Thorpe describes X's and O's as adult why-choose romance with explicit content, and that is accurate. The audiobook includes spicy scenes that are part of the story's fabric rather than isolated moments. Kelsey Navarro Foster handles these passages with the same directness she brings to the darker content.
Is X a likable hero despite the psychopath framing?
Thorpe leans into X's instability and makes the humor part of his characterization rather than a mitigation of it. Reviewers consistently note that X is the character they didn't expect to enjoy and did anyway - the bad jokes and the genuine menace coexist rather than cancel each other out. Whether that works is genuinely a matter of individual tolerance for the type.
Can I listen to this audiobook without having read any of Elle Thorpe's previous work?
Yes. X's and O's introduces Saint View and its cast without requiring knowledge of Thorpe's earlier novels. The world-building is contained within the trilogy itself, and this first volume establishes the characters and setting from scratch.
