The Moonlit Pact - an ARC Book Review

December 06, 2025

The Moonlit Pact - an ARC Book Review

**Thank you to Lenena Ronheer and Booksprout for providing me with an e-ARC copy in exchange for my honest review. All thoughts and opinions expressed are my own.**

✨️ Book Title: The Moonlit Pact: The Silver Hollows Chronicles - Book #1

✨️ Author: Lenena Ronheer

✨️ Genre: Fantasy

✨️ Tropes: Shifter/werewolf, lone FMC, power-hungry villain

⭐️ Star Rating: 2.5 / 5 stars

🌶 Spice Level: 0 / 5 peppers (no spice/intimacy at all)

⚠️ Trigger Warnings: death, violence, dark & supernatural demons, cult-like group/behaviours

📅 Release Date: October 20, 2025

It was something older, darker, an entity cloaked in shadows, its features ever-changing, like the darkness itself had taken form. Its eyes burned with a cold, endless hunger, and its presence sent waves of suffocating dread through the room.

Wolf shifter to the supernatural, Manchester detective to the human realm, Isla Crowley finds herself in the middle of a seemingly impossible serial killer case. What makes this case so different? Ritual killings from a supernatural force that threatens to upend the balance held between the human realm and the supernatural realm. Will Isla be able to stop the killer and restore balance, or will she find herself pulled into the enticing darkness?

Supernatural fantasy meets mystery in Lenena Ronheer’s The Moonlit Pact. Readers can expect to follow a strong, independent female main character, who’s faced with a string of homicide case that brings both of her lives colliding. This read presents an excellent concept that I was eager to devour. Unfortunately, the rushed feeling this novel held made this read fall short for me.

Especially in fantasy, I live for extra details to form a better sense of imagery and to enhance the world-building. I also love a fast-paced storyline that really keeps its readers on their toes… until it’s so fast-paced that it becomes rushed, losing necessary details. In this instance, I felt The Moonlit Pact fell into the trap of the latter. This had me re-reading some sections of the novel to ensure I hadn’t missed critical details along the way. It also made transitions between scenes a little disconnected.

Putting the pace aside, readers can expect fantastic uses of personification and imagery scattered throughout The Moonlit Pact in lines like:

Every snap of a twig, every rustle of leaves felt amplified, as if the woods were holding their breath.

This was what hooked me into the storyline more, allowing me to visualize the character’s surroundings with ease. I just wish there was more of this to really enthrall me into the story more.

With that being said, The Moonlit Pact is a good book to pick up for fans of a short but fast-paced fantasy read. It definitely makes for a good palate cleanser between the emotionally damaging books many of us routinely indulge in.