Verdict: A genuinely fresh Scottish-folklore vampire premise and a superb gothic opening, held back by heavy repetition and a structural break that turns the back half into a different book.
Best for: Readers who want Edinburgh atmosphere and Boabhan Sith mythology instead of standard vampire lore, who read for theme over polish, and who are happy for a two-woman romance to open out into a polyamorous one.
Heat level: ★★★★☆ (4/5 — graphic, but heavily front-loaded)
Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.5/5 — a 3.84 Goodreads average across just 92 ratings, and a craft complaint her five-star reviewers raise too)
Tropes: Vampire romance, Scottish folklore, forbidden love, immortal and mortal, slow burn, morally grey heroines, found family, polyamory, ancient curse, age gap.
Blood Marks by Ruby Scott is a standalone, independently published sapphic paranormal fantasy romance set in modern Edinburgh, where Greer Morrigan Dubhán — an architect who has spent centuries hiding that she is one of the Boabhan Sith, the vampiric women of Scottish legend — collides with Freya Solasta, an artist whose eye for pattern sees straight through the disguise.
It has a 3.84 average across 92 Goodreads ratings, a 4.2 across 79 Amazon ratings, and a review section that divides almost exactly at the book’s midpoint rather than along the usual love-it-or-hate-it line. That is an unusually specific split, and it is worth understanding before you start.
What Is Blood Marks About?
Blood Marks is a dark urban fantasy romance, and the “urban” matters as much as the “dark” — this is contemporary Edinburgh, not a secondary world, with the Old Town’s closes and stairwells doing the gothic work that a castle would do elsewhere. The vampires are not Dracula’s descendants. They are the baobhan sìth of Scottish folklore, and Scott builds an origin for them out of women executed as witches, which reframes the whole monster idea as something done to women rather than something they are.
Greer is introduced through her control: centuries of hunger managed, silver markings hidden, a life deliberately kept small. Freya is introduced through what she assumes she is looking at — an interesting woman with a secret — and she is wrong about the scale of it. The antagonist, Agnes Lasair, is a religious zealot hunting the supernatural with blessed iron and a following of altered humans. The book is told largely through Freya as the outsider learning the rules, which is why the first act reads as discovery and the second act does not.
What Makes This Sapphic Vampire Romantasy Work
- The folklore: The Boabhan Sith basis is the most-praised element by a distance, and it is the one thing praised by fans and detractors alike — even the readers who abandoned the book say the mythology is what kept them reading as long as they did.
- The Edinburgh setting: Readers name the city specifically rather than generically. One reviewer says outright that the Old Town is why she bought it, and the atmosphere is the most common word in the five-star reviews.
- The opening act: Multiple reviewers describe the first section as a beautiful gothic novel in its own right. Two of them rate it five stars in isolation before explaining why the whole book is not.
- The politics under the plot: A striking number of readers read the persecution storyline as being about present-day bigotry, and say so unprompted. It is the reason most often given for a five-star rating.
- A complete ending: This is a standalone. It resolves, there is a happily-ever-after, and nothing is being withheld for a sequel that does not exist.
Book Synopsis
Greer Morrigan Dubhán has been in Edinburgh a very long time. She designs buildings, keeps regular hours, and lets the city assume she is exactly what she appears to be. The silver markings under her skin stay covered. The hunger stays managed. The arrangement has held for centuries, largely because Greer has never given anyone a reason to look closely.
Freya Solasta looks closely at everything. She is an abstract painter whose whole practice is noticing pattern where other people see noise, and when she meets Greer she registers immediately that something in the composition is wrong — older than it should be, and arranged too carefully. She does not frighten, and she does not leave. What she does instead is keep asking, which is the one thing Greer has no defence against.
While the two of them circle each other, Edinburgh is becoming dangerous. Agnes Lasair, remade by what she believes was holy fire, is moving through the city with blessed iron and a following of altered humans, hunting anything she has decided is unnatural. Greer has survived every previous purge by disappearing. This time there is someone she would have to disappear from, and the curse that made her kind in the first place is beginning to surface in ways she cannot explain. Freya is left with a decision the book has been walking toward from the first chapter: step back out of a world she was never meant to see, or change into something that can survive inside it.
My Review
The premise is the best thing here and I want to be unqualified about it, because a lot of what follows is not. Sapphic vampire romance is a crowded shelf right now, and almost all of it runs on the same borrowed machinery. Scott went to Scottish folklore instead, built her vampires out of the baobhan sìth, and rooted their origin in the execution of women — so the predator myth becomes a story about what was done to them. That is a real idea, and the opening act delivers it with genuine gothic control. Several readers who ended up disappointed still describe the first section as beautiful.
The setting earns its keep too. Edinburgh is not wallpaper — readers name specific parts of the city, and the atmosphere is the single most consistent thing in the positive reviews. The other real strength is thematic. The persecution plot lands hard enough that a striking number of reviewers connect it to present-day bigotry without being invited to, and that political charge is the most common reason given for a five-star rating. When this book is working, it is doing something more interesting than romance-with-fangs.
Where it struggles is structure, and this is not one reader’s gripe. Roughly a third of the written Goodreads reviews raise repetition — and crucially, so do several four- and five-star reviews, which is the strongest possible signal that it is a craft problem rather than a taste one. Readers report the same phrases, the same explanations and the same planning scenes cycling around: patterns, hunger, darkness, the curse. Sitting under that is a sharper complaint. Three independent reviewers say the book changes character entirely at Freya’s transformation, roughly the midpoint. One says it “didn’t even feel like the same book anymore.” Another says it would rate higher if it had ended at part one. Of the 25 written Goodreads reviews, three are did-not-finish, and two of those abandoned it in the back half. StoryGraph would normally give a percentage here, but with eight ratings split across two duplicate records it has no meaningful figure to give.
Two expectations to reset, and the second one matters more. First, the heat: it is explicit and it is frequent, but two readers independently report that it thins out badly after the midpoint, against a listing that sells high heat throughout. Second, and this is the most useful thing in the review — the Amazon page presents this as Greer and Freya. It is not. The romance opens out into a polyamorous relationship involving four women, and one Amazon reviewer, who says the book “strolls right into polyamory,” found that genuinely deceptive. Other readers loved it and specifically praise the representation. The Apple Books listing discloses it plainly, promising “Four powerful women whose loves and lives become inextricably entwined.” The Amazon listing does not. If polyamory is what you want, this is a selling point nobody told you about; if you were expecting a two-hander, know now.
My honest note: A first act worth five stars attached to a second act that loses the thread, plus a repetition problem even the fans mention. If a strong premise and a real atmosphere are enough to carry you through a baggy back half, the folklore alone justifies the trip — but go in knowing what the romance turns into.
| Element | In Blood Marks |
|---|---|
| Central relationship | Greer Morrigan Dubhán & Freya Solasta — centuries-old Boabhan Sith and a mortal artist, opening into a polyamorous four-way bond |
| Core tropes | Vampire romance, Scottish folklore, forbidden love, immortal and mortal, slow burn, morally grey heroines, found family, polyamory |
| Setting | Modern-day Edinburgh — the Old Town, its closes and its history of witch trials |
| Heat level | 4/5 — graphic and frequent early, reported by readers as thinning in the back half |
| Series | Standalone — complete arc, an HEA, no sequel announced |
| Content notes | Explicit sexual content, religious persecution and zealotry, historical execution and burning of women, supernatural violence, blood and feeding, bigotry as a central theme, polyamory |
How Dark and Spicy Is Blood Marks?
Call it a 4/5, and here is the honest caveat on that number: romance.io has no entry for this book at all. Ruby Scott is in that database with a dozen other titles, so the gap is specific to Blood Marks rather than to the author, and it means the site’s usual canonical heat source is simply unavailable. The 4 comes from two places instead. I Heart SapphFic files it in its “Hot & Steamy” band — full graphic sexual content — and reader reports back that up: the scenes are explicit, they recur, and several reviewers specifically praise them for carrying emotional weight rather than functioning as interludes. It is not a 5 only because of the distribution problem, not the explicitness.
The element worth flagging in advance is the same one the review section keeps circling: two independent readers report that the spice largely disappears in the second half, which is a real mismatch with how the book is marketed. Beyond that, no reviewer flags specific kink content, and on darkness — there is supernatural violence, a persecution plot and on-page feeding, but nobody I found reports torture or gore. If you want this heat level with a steadier distribution, Her Spell That Binds Me and Tryst Six Venom both sit a band higher and stay there.
Who Should Read This Book?
You’ll likely love it if: you are tired of interchangeable vampire lore and want folklore with actual roots, you read for atmosphere and theme above structure, you want a persecution story with real political charge, and polyamorous representation is something you actively want.
You may want to skip it if: repeated phrasing and recycled scenes pull you out of a book, you need the back half to hold the shape the first half set up, you want the heat sustained across the whole novel, or you came for a two-woman romance and would feel misled by a throuple.
In short: an excellent gothic opening and a genuinely original mythology, in a book that stops governing itself around the halfway mark.
What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)
The most important context here is how little of it there is. Eighteen months after release, Blood Marks has 92 Goodreads ratings, 25 written reviews, 79 Amazon ratings and eight StoryGraph ratings — and StoryGraph’s are split across two duplicate records, one of which has no cover, no blurb and no ratings at all, an artefact of the book carrying different subtitles on different editions. There is no BookTok moment, no Reddit footprint I could find, and no trade or blog coverage whatsoever: no Publishers Weekly, no Kirkus, nothing at The Lesbrary, LezReviewBooks, Bookish Sapphic or Jude in the Stars. The Amazon listing has no editorial reviews block because there is nothing to put in it. A sample this thin does not support confident claims about consensus, and the recommendations below are weighted accordingly — what makes them usable is that the same handful of specific observations recur across independent readers on two platforms. Discovery appears to be running almost entirely through the author’s existing readership and Amazon’s category placement, where it sits around #1,600 in LGBTQ+ Fantasy Fiction. There is an audiobook, released February 2025 and running 10 hours 39 minutes, but Apple states it is narrated by a digital voice modelled on a human one — so there is no narrator performance to assess and no listener reaction to report, and there is no Libro.fm edition.
Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The Boabhan Sith mythology, first and by a wide margin — readers repeatedly frame it as a relief from standard vampire fiction, and the witch-trial origin draws specific admiration. Then Edinburgh: the city is named concretely, not gestured at. Third, and more strongly than I expected, the theme. Reviewer after reviewer describes the book as being about love defeating organised hatred and connects it explicitly to the present day; that reading is the most common justification for a five-star rating, and it comes from readers on both Goodreads and Amazon independently. The spice is praised for being written with feeling. Polyamorous representation is named as a positive by several readers, directly contradicting the reviewer who felt ambushed by it — which is worth flagging, because it means that element divides rather than simply fails.
What readers argue about and complain about: Repetition, above everything. Roughly a third of the written Goodreads reviews raise it, and it is raised by four- and five-star reviewers as well as by the critical ones — readers describe the same explanations, the same planning sequences and the same motifs recurring past the point of use. Second, and more damaging: the midpoint break. Three independent reviewers say the novel changes fundamentally at Freya’s transformation, describing a different writing style, dropped plot lines and a narrative that stops cohering; one says plainly it should have ended at part one. Third, the pacing and scene transitions in the back half, described as jumpy and under-signposted, with the final confrontation called drawn out. Fourth, the antagonist: several readers find Agnes’s storyline underexplained and her motivation thin. Beyond that, three of the 25 written reviews are did-not-finish. Where readers genuinely split is the polyamory turn — celebrated as representation by some, experienced as a bait-and-switch by others — and that split is not going to resolve, because it is a question of what you were promised rather than of what is on the page.
The standalone question worth asking first: good news, and it is unambiguous. Blood Marks is a standalone. It closes its arc, delivers a happily-ever-after, requires nothing before or after it, and no sequel has been announced. So the real question is where you go next in Scott’s catalogue, and the numbers there are genuinely instructive: at 3.84, Blood Marks is the lowest-rated book she has written. Her other titles cluster between 4.45 and 4.90, and her most-read book, May I Call You Mistress?, holds 4.11 across 549 ratings — six times this book’s rating base. If this one does not land for you, that is worth knowing: readers who follow her are considerably happier elsewhere, and The Turning, at 4.63 across 117 ratings, is the strongest-performing entry point.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Blood Marks end on a cliffhanger?
No. It is a standalone with a complete arc and a happily-ever-after, and no sequel has been announced. Nothing is being held back for a follow-up.
Is Blood Marks part of a series?
No. Ruby Scott writes several series, including City General and Awakening of Desire, but Blood Marks is not part of any of them. Goodreads, Amazon and Fantastic Fiction all list it as a standalone.
How spicy is Blood Marks?
A 4/5. romance.io has no entry for it, so that number comes from I Heart SapphFic’s “Hot & Steamy” classification plus reader reports of explicit, frequent scenes. Two readers note the heat drops off noticeably in the second half.
Is the romance between two women?
Not throughout. It begins as Greer and Freya but opens into a polyamorous relationship involving four women. The Apple Books listing says so; the Amazon listing does not, and at least one reviewer found that omission genuinely misleading.
Are the vampires standard vampires?
No, and this is the book’s best feature. They are the Boabhan Sith of Scottish folklore, given an origin in the execution of women as witches. Readers consistently name this as the freshest thing in the novel.
Is there an audiobook?
Yes, running 10 hours 39 minutes and released in February 2025 — but Apple states it is narrated by a digital voice based on a human narrator, not by a human performer. There is no Libro.fm edition.
If You Loved Blood Marks, Read These Next
If the draw was indie sapphic romantasy with a premise stronger than its polish, Her Spell That Binds Me makes almost exactly the same trade — superb atmosphere, craft problems its own reviewers name. If it was the explicit heat and the morally grey lead, Tryst Six Venom runs hotter and sustains it, in a contemporary setting with no supernatural element. And Scott’s own blurb points readers toward Ruby Roe’s dark gothic romantasy, which is the closest match for the Edinburgh-shadows register — we have not reviewed it yet, so for now the paranormal and fantasy lesbian romance category is the place to browse. More in this register sits in our spicy sapphic romantasy guide and the full Book Reviews collection.
The Bottom Line
Blood Marks is a book with a better idea than most of its shelf and less discipline than it needs. The Boabhan Sith mythology is genuinely fresh, Edinburgh is used properly rather than decoratively, and the persecution theme carries a political charge that readers respond to hard and unprompted. It is also badly repetitive, structurally broken at its midpoint, and marketed on Amazon as a relationship it stops being halfway through. With 92 Goodreads ratings behind it, the aggregate is soft enough that your mileage genuinely may vary — but the specific complaints recur too consistently across independent readers to dismiss. Worth it if the folklore and the atmosphere are what you came for and you can forgive a back half that loses its grip. Check Blood Marks on Amazon →
The Eikna Overall Ranking
On the Eikna scale, Blood Marks ranks as an original-mythology indie sapphic vampire romance — strikingly fresh in its folklore and its politics, undone by repetition and a mid-book collapse in structure, and best approached for the Edinburgh gothic and the Boabhan Sith rather than for the romance it advertises.
The Evidence Scorecard
Overall ★★★★☆ 3.5/5
- ✓ 3.84 average across only 92 Goodreads ratings
- ✓ Folklore premise praised by fans and critics alike
- ✓ Lowest-rated book in Scott’s catalogue
- ✓ Repetition named even in five-star reviews
Romance ★★★★☆ 3.6/5
- ✓ Slow burn charged with real yearning
- ✓ Freya’s outsider POV drives the tension
- ✓ Polyamorous turn celebrated by several readers
- ✓ Same turn undisclosed on the Amazon listing
Characters ★★★★☆ 3.7/5
- ✓ Greer’s centuries of control read as lived-in
- ✓ StoryGraph: flaws a main focus, 100%
- ✓ Freya’s artist’s eye is a real plot engine
- ✓ Agnes repeatedly called underexplained
Writing ★★★☆☆ 3.1/5
- ✓ Opening act called beautiful by detractors too
- ✓ Edinburgh atmosphere consistently praised
- ✓ Spice written with emotional weight
- ✓ Repetition in a third of written reviews
Emotional Impact ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ Persecution theme read as contemporary, unprompted
- ✓ Witch-trial origin gives the monsters weight
- ✓ Most-cited reason for five-star ratings
- ✓ Repetition drains the back half
Heat Level ★★★★☆ 4/5
- ✓ I Heart SapphFic files it Hot & Steamy
- ✓ Explicit and recurring in the first half
- ✓ Readers praise the emotion inside the scenes
- ✓ Two readers report it thinning after the midpoint
Ending ★★★★☆ 3.8/5
- ✓ True standalone, no cliffhanger
- ✓ HEA readers describe as earned
- ✓ Resolution method praised as inventive
- ✓ Final confrontation called drawn out
Re-read Value ★★★☆☆ 3.4/5
- ✓ Edinburgh and the folklore reward a return
- ✓ One reader plans repeat re-reads
- ✓ Opening act stands alone as gothic
- ✓ 424 repetitive pages discourage it
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