Is Love of Kill Worth Reading? Review & Where to Read

Overview

Love of Kill opens on a premise that could easily have gone wrong: Song Ryang-ha, a hitman, is hired to kill bounty hunter Chateau Dankworth, and instead of pulling the trigger, starts relentlessly pursuing her — trading information for dates, showing up uninvited, refusing to take no for an answer. Fe's manga spends its early volumes letting that be exactly as uncomfortable as it sounds, before slowly revealing the reason behind it: Song and Chateau share a traumatic childhood, and his fixation is less romantic opportunism than an attempt to repay a debt he's carried for years.

What it does well

The thing that keeps Love of Kill from being a lesser, more generic version of its premise is patience. Fe doesn't rush to make Song's pursuit charming — it stays genuinely unsettling for a real stretch of the story, with Chateau repeatedly and believably rejecting him, before the manga earns the reveal that recontextualizes everything. By the time the backstory lands, the relationship has shifted from 'hitman won't leave bounty hunter alone' into something considerably more complicated and, eventually, more mutual.

Chateau herself is a big part of why this works. She's not a passive object of pursuit; she's a sharp, guarded professional who spends most of the manga keeping Song at arm's length on her own terms, and her slow thaw feels earned rather than inevitable. Fe's art is also a real strength here — the action sequences, which make up a good portion of the page count, are clean and legible even in chaotic gunfights, and the character acting in quieter scenes carries a lot of the emotional weight without needing much dialogue.

Where it falls short

The opening stretch is a genuine ask. Song's behavior in the early volumes is written to be uncomfortable, and the manga doesn't soften that for readers who want the central relationship to feel safe or mutual from the start — you have to trust that the payoff is coming, and some readers understandably won't want to make that trade regardless of how well it's eventually justified. Chateau's side of the emotional arc also develops more slowly than Song's for a long stretch, which can make the pursuit feel lopsided before the later volumes rebalance it. And outside the two leads, the supporting cast around Ritzland Support — Euripedes, Jim, the wider cast of hunters and hitmen — gets comparatively little room to breathe.

Verdict

Love of Kill takes a premise that could have been a one-note stalker romance and turns it into a genuinely patient, well-constructed thriller once the backstory lands. If you can sit with an uncomfortable opening stretch in exchange for a complete, earned payoff, this is one of the better violent romance-thrillers manga has to offer. If the setup alone is a dealbreaker, nothing in the later volumes will change your mind.