Happy release day and congratulations to author Cassandra Aston on the release of Whispers Among Thorns, the first book in the Deadly Fae duology!
Whispers Among Thorns (Deadly Fae Duology Book 1)
Release Date: June 24th (ebook) & June 25th (print)
Genre: A Dark Fantasy Forbidden Romance
💀 Enemies to Lovers
🌿 Slow Burn
💀 Forbidden
🌿 Age Gap (she’s older)
💀 Morally Grey FMC
🌿 Cinnamon Roll MMC
💀 One Kelpie/One Horse
Quicksilver meets Throne of Glass in a New York City setting, where she’s the centuries old fae and he’s the son of her enemy.
There’s only one rule that truly matters. Never fall in love with a human. Break it and die.
Banished to the human realm, stripped of her magic, and bound by the unjust laws of the Inter-Species Alliance, Sav is forbidden from harming humans… or loving them. Now she’s meant to live quietly, obey the rules, and forget the power that once throbbed beneath her skin.
When the leader of the anti-fae movement destroys her home in an attack on her people, she’s captured and brought to their headquarters. The only thing standing between her and freedom is Jack. Sharp-edged, unafraid, and entirely off-limits, he stirs something in her she thought long buried. Something that makes her question everything she knows.
Darkly gripping and dangerously addictive, Whispers Among Thorns is a story of forbidden love, fractured loyalties, and a girl who was never meant to follow the rules.
We have an absolutely gorgeous cover reveal for you all today! Check out Jeweler to the Blessed by Jillian Witt! You’re going to want to pre-order this one!
Jeweler to the Blessed (Champions of Chaos #1)
Expected Release Date: Aug 19th
Genre: Romantic Fantasy
– Bodyguard romance
– Succubus like mood ring magic
– Meddling goddesses
– Deadly forest
– Touch her and die
In a kingdom where touch drains emotions for power, Emberline masks hers, but when she becomes the key to the Blessed’s magic, her broad-shouldered, irreverent guard could make her feel too much.
His touch would be her undoing.
With a single touch, the ruling Blessed could realize Emberline Arkova is immune to their magic. She’s determined to leave the kingdom in search of answers, because every day she remains is a risk.
But her uncle’s sudden disappearance upends her plans. Thrust into his role as jeweler, she’s gone from avoiding the Blessed to becoming the center of their world. Uniquely able to identify the gems required for their magic, she’s now their most precious resource.
To protect their prize, Hart, a broad-shouldered guard with particular irreverence, is assigned to keep Emberline safe. His motives may be murky at best, but he’s not as loyal to the king as a Blessed should be, and now, putting her trust in him is her best bet to escape without discovery.
Hart may be one of them, but he awakens long-restrained feelings within Emberline. She can’t fall for a Blessed; his touch would expose her secret. But as she unearths the mysteries of magic and politics in the isolated and restless kingdom, Emberline is faced with a choice: flee her fate and hide her feelings—or embrace it and unleash them.
The swoon-worthy tension of From Blood and Ash meets One Dark Window’s unique magic system and rich world-building in this new adult romantasy.
We’re thrilled to present the cover for Wicked Onyx, the first book in The Veritas series by Debbie Cassidy!
Wicked Onyx (The Veritas Legacy #1)
Expected Release Date: February 10, 2026
Genre: Dark Academia/ Romantasy
You don’t graduate Nightsbridge Academy—you survive it.
Born into a sorcerer bloodline, cursed, and cut off from my power, I was accustomed to being an outcast. For generations, my bloodline carried the weight of a crime committed by our ancestor. But my mother’s death changed everything. She left a clue that could prove our innocence: an ancient text hidden deep beneath Nightsbridge Academy.
The Academy is a fortress of power, housing the most dangerous incantors and sorcerers, conscripted to keep Horrors and Echoes at bay. And as the last surviving Onyx, I’m owed admission.
My plan is simple—find the book and expose the Imperium as the liars they are.
But I didn’t plan for the whispers that haunt my dreams. Or the complication of feelings I shouldn’t be capable of—stirred by two men bound to the very institution I’ve come to destroy. One sees too much yet says too little. The other is steady, protective, and always in my corner.
I can’t have either.
Yet when I’m in their presence…my curse begins to crack.
If they discover my true purpose, I’m dead.
But some truths are worth dying for.
The Imperium cursed my bloodline. Stripped us of our magic. Branded us as traitors. And now they will pay.
Happy release day to author Poppy L. Roberts! Check out Vessel, a sapphic horrormance you will want to add to the top of your TBR!
Vessel
Publication Date: June 20, 2025
Genre: Sapphic Paranormal Romance/ Horrormance
Cults
Ritual Sacrifice
River Baths
Morally Gray FMCs
Hand Necklaces
Dark Secrets
Forced Proximity
Demons and Dark Magic
The hollow waits.
Harper is lost—drowning in a life that feels hollow, disconnected, and disenchanting. Technology, consumerism, and monotony have drained the world of meaning, leaving her restless and yearning for something real. Then one day in her search for feeling, she stumbles across an obscure online forum whispering about Saint’s Hollow, an off-grid commune hidden deep in the mountains. They promise her a detox from the bog of her overwhelming life and reconnection with herself. They promise belonging.
Desperate for escape, Harper sells everything, erases her old life, and follows the invitation that simply reads: We’ve been waiting for you.
Saint’s Hollow is beautiful, untouched by the decay of modern life. Its people are warm, and its leader, Naamah, is intoxicating. But the deeper Harper sinks into their world, the more her reality fractures. Strangeness seeps into every crevice of life in Saint’s Hollow. Shadowed figures haunt her movements and the darkness whispers back.
As Harper unravels, she faces an impossible choice: fight for her fading humanity or surrender to the darkness that has always been waiting.
Because Saint’s Hollow doesn’t just want her dreams.
CW: This book is intended for adults and may contain graphic or distressing content, including graphic on-page violence, death, gore, and explicit sexual content. A detailed list of content notes can be found at authorpoppyroberts.com.
Welcome to the tour for The Dragon Favorite, a dark fantasy by Onika Howdyn! Read on for more details!
The Dragon Favorite: Beginnings Duology
Release Date: March 10, 2024
Genre: Dark Fantasy
Robust world-building and lore…
A mother’s struggle with mental health…
Dark themes and equally dark villains…
Forbidden love and loyalty…
Spicy yet poetic adult themes…
An underground realm of magic and its wielders…
Reading between the strands of fate and prophecies
Dragons… (that’s a given)
Welcome to Jöro…
…a land once teeming with the majestic presence of dragons, known as the Draughtrìnd, now reduced to ashes by the insatiable greed of a malevolent king. Though the war between man and dragon has faded into the past, the lingering aversion towards magic and its wielders remains.
In the river city of Rau, Amalya dreams of adventure beyond her father’s cozy farm. When she stumbles upon a wounded dragon with the farmhand, Wesley, her dreams of adventure take flight. As the years pass, love and family gradually fade that memory into the background of her life, becoming the only remaining beacon of hope.
Now, Amalya finds herself trapped in the clutches of depression, forced to observe the vestiges of her joy in the eyes of her son. The realization that she will never genuinely reclaim that joy plunges her further into the depths of despair.
When a mysterious man arrives to help on the farm, Amalya feels an unexplainable sense of familiarity. Could he be her only chance to break free from the torment that has haunted her since motherhood? And what consequences must she face to reclaim her light?
Happy release day to author Jennifer Kropf and congratulations on the release of The Scarlet Star!
Inspired by the fairytale Beauty and the Beast and the Biblical story of Queen Esther, this mashup of high stakes, forbidden romance, and dangerous secrets isn’t the fairytale you know.
The Scarlet Star (Songs of the Adriels Book 1)
Release Date: June 18, 2025
Genre: YA Fantasy/ Fairy Tales/ Christian Fantasy
He’s a beast trapped in a palace, and she’s a beauty tangled in his web…
Nineteen-year-old Ryn Electus is captured and brought to the palace for a twelve-week trial period along with three of the fairest maidens in the kingdom to try and ‘steal the heart’ of a young, tormented King with a deadly secret. Unfortunately, the King appears to have no interest in the maidens and keeps getting himself into trouble.
But the King isn’t the only one with a dangerous secret. Ryn has been living in hiding all these years, until she’s dragged from her home and put on a public stage where she finds herself in the crosshairs of the Intelligentsia; a council of sages who serve the seven Celestial Divinities and conspire to destroy people like her. If the sages discover who Ryn really is, she’ll be dead by morning.
Things get even more complicated when Ryn learns what Xerxes is fighting against, the internal wars he’s waging on his own, and why he keeps getting himself into trouble.
However, shortly after Ryn arrives at the palace, an old priestess opens Ryn’s eyes to see the workings of false gods at war who are influencing the kingdom of Per-Siana at every turn, dragging the people into destruction and causing chaos. Ryn is forced to question everything she thought she knew about the gods, until she unexpectedly gains the favour of an ancient god who’s been “silent” for decades; the God Original, the first God, enemy of the Celestial Divinities, who beckons Ryn to shake up the very foundations of the domain.
Thus begins a battle fought in the shadows alongside a war of gowns and politics waged in the spotlight.
Ryn must do everything she can to hide that she’s a descendant of King Xerxes’s enemies, and she and Xerxes were born as rivals, destined to hate and destroy each other.
She has only weeks to decide which side she’s on.
This book is ideal for fans of The Selection Series by Kiara Cass and A Curse so Dark and Lonely by Brigid Kemmerer and includes gorgeous character illustrations by Kyannah Durocher.
R&R Book Tours proudly presents the cover for The Frost Witch by Emberly Ash! You can pre-order this gorgeous dark romantasy now!
The Frost Witch (The Covenants of Velora Book 1)
Expected Release Date: August 5, 2025
Genre: Dark Romantasy
Enemies to lovers
Why choose
Witches
MCs bonded against their will
Dragons
Slow-burn spice
Found family
Shifters
Tall/Short MMC/FMC
Deadly trials
Meddling gods
Mental health rep
Forbidden love
Fae
Witches are not born. They are made.
I died alone in a frostbitten forest. It was not heroic. I did not die defending an innocent or hunting to feed my loved ones. I died because I was stupid and cowardly. I died running away. And that would have been the end of my story. Until the witches found me and made me one of their own.
Outcast by her coven more than three hundred years after her resurrection, Koryn faces certain doom. Without her coven’s magic to sustain her, she will wither away to nothing. But earning back their trust means betraying the last living member of her family—the family whose downfall came at Koryn’s own hands.
Offered a bargain she cannot refuse…
Four hundred years ago, the gods sentenced the continent of Velora to death. Now Koryn must make a desperate final bid to save Velora—and herself—by passing each test posed at the Seven Gates. Nothing less will prove her worth to her coven or save her family.
To make matters worse, she finds herself bound against her will to Garrick the Red, a legendary bounty hunter with a secret that makes him not just her rival, but her bitter enemy. She does not need him to protect her—Koryn stands alone.
But when an adolescent dragon appears from the forest and declares herself Koryn’s familar, her understanding of the world begins to shift. Koryn’s choices do not just affect her, but all the residents of a dying, desperate land.
Faced with a devastating choice…
For every gate she conquers, Koryn’s world grows more precarious. A deadly warrior turned bonded protector and forbidden lover. An adolescent dragon entrusted to her care. A powerful male from her past calling in a debt she is not ready to pay. And vengeful gods who demand their due, and force the frost witch to choose—her coven, her love, her dragon… or her soul.
Emberly Ash returns with an all new dark romantasy series perfect for fans of Sadie Kincaid, Carissa Broadbent, and Raven Kennedy. THE FROST WITCH is an epic dark fantasy romance with enemies to lovers, multiple bonded love interests, witches, an adolescent dragon, slow-burn spice, found family, and an expansive world of gods, shifters, and blood magic. The heat builds with each installment in this trilogy—have a cold drink ready. This universe is not for the faint of heart.
Triggers: starvation, dystopian world, prostitution, anxiety, murder, profanity, references to past sexual assault (not MCs), explict sexual content, graphic depictions of death, violence, and torture.
We’re celebrating the release of Hate to Haunt You this week with a tour! Follow along for reviews and other great content – #rrbtHatetoHauntYouTour
Hate To Haunt You (Afterlife Incorporated Book 2)
Release Date: June 16, 2025
Genre: Sapphic Urban Fantasy
Slow burn
Hurt/comfort
Ghosts
Grim reapers
You always haunt the ones you love.
First, I got stuck as a ghost in the suburbs of Toronto. Now my reaper roommate is dying. Dying! Reapers aren’t even supposed to get the sniffles.
Turns out, we’re connected, and I don’t just mean a shared love of pineapple on pizza. Kelly and I have a rare and dangerous bond that’s draining my favourite reaper’s very essence away. If we don’t figure out how to break the link, Kelly is headed for a permanent sabbatical.
Now we’re exploring creepy corners of Afterlife, making risky deals with paranormal weirdos, and—worst of all—I might be falling for the reaper I’m literally haunting to death.
Being dead has never been easy, and there’s no way in hell I’m facing it alone. It’s time to save Kelly, even if it means breaking my own heart in the process.
Hate to Haunt You is the second instalment in the Afterlife Incorporated urban fantasy trilogy. It cannot be read as a standalone. Kelly and Ember’s romance? Still a work in progress.
My thoughts: I loved the first book in this series and was so excited to read this, I fell off my bed when I opened the email with my copy attached! Honestly, I am that clumsy.
After the crazy events of book one things have started to improve in Afterlife, and Ember is bored of all the constant meetings to discuss things. She wants to start getting things done, but none of the reapers have signed up to help.
Luckily her roommates and Kelly, her personal reaper and friend, are there to keep her spirits up, they’ve even got a new cat, that hopefully isn’t secretly a god-like being (aren’t they all, at least in their own minds?)
But something is very wrong with Kelly and it might be the connection between ghost and reaper that’s causing it. Their journey to uncover the problem and find a solution will take them to all sorts of new (to Ember, anyway) parts of Afterlife, bring them face to face with a soul-sucking ghoul, and stretch their connection to its limits. Also Ember might be falling in love with Kelly, if that’s even possible.
I really enjoyed this secret outing for Ember, Kelly and their friends, which was definitely darker than book one, but really gave the characters room to grow, for us to see more of Afterlife, and set up book three (yes!) to be even more shocking and probably make me cry. Kelly’s apathy about what’s happening to them was a bit frustrating and I felt for Ember, trying to do everything she could to save her friend, with Jupiter and X trying to help, even though as living people there were places they couldn’t go. I think after however long Kelly has been undead (I don’t know how reapers see themselves) they’re just not sure how to react anymore.
Check out The Last Dragon of Oz, a Wizard of Oz reimagining by Whitney L. Spradling
The Last Dragon of Oz
Release Date: March 3, 2025
Genre: Fantasy/ Why Choose Romance
Why Choose
Fated Mates
Enemies to Lovers
MFMM
Spice
Multi POV
Ace Rep
Disability Rep
Italian Myth/Folklore
Light Mafia Vibes
Baby Dragon
Standalone
HEA
There is no place like home. And sometimes, home isn’t a place at all.
Daciana DeRosa is content to live her pampered life, spoiled by her father. But when she finds a baby dragon in her yard, in a world where magic has long since disappeared, she has no other choice but to team up with three unlikely allies.
Nicolai Morelli, the Tin Man, is from a rival family. He wants nothing to do with Daci, but his ties to Oz are the only way she can get the baby dragon back to its home.
Matteo Rossi, the Scarecrow, goes along for the ride. Always looking for adventure and fun, he doesn’t expect to find himself in such a serious and troubling situation.
Leith Morgan, the Cowardly Lion, keeps everyone at arm’s length. As they journey through Oz, he finds it harder to keep away from Daci.
Their journey to the Emerald City is fraught with adventure, dangers, magic, fate, and a growing connection none of them can ignore. As they travel down the yellow brick road, Daci learns she’s not as in control of her life as she once thought. But fighting fate turns out to be harder than it seems, and it’s a lesson all four of them must learn.
*The Last Dragon of Oz is a Wonderful Wizard of Oz re-imagining. It is a why choose romance, meaning the main character will end up with three men at the end of the book. Please check content warnings as some themes may not be suitable for all ages.
We have another amazing fantasy coming out this week! The Gloom Sundered by Dana C. Brentson! Get it June 17th!
The Gloom Sundered: A Tale of Celuthia
Release Date: June 17, 2023
Genre: Epic Fantasy/ Dystopian/ Why Choose
⚡️Ordinary MCs in a Magical World
⚡️Plus-size FMC
⚡️Golden Retriever MMC
⚡️Friends to Lovers
⚡️Why Choose Spicy Romance
⚡️Political Intrigue
⚡️Magic Storms
The Storm is rising.
The Gloom is destroying Vortheim. These storms of unpredictable magic ravage the continent, swallowing anything they touch. Isalie Wylshard is a Still, an ordinary woman meant to serve the Ambient—the only ones with magic to protect against the Gloom. But Isalie won’t fit into the mold they’ve made for her, choosing instead to follow her best friend as he pursues his dangerous calling, even though he’s never noticed she’s in love with him.
Jentien Themori’s calling is to save people, battling the twisted creatures that emerge from the Gloom. When the opportunity to track these volatile storms arises, he and Isalie don’t hesitate to join the team. They expected danger, but they didn’t expect to be caught inside a city lost to the Gloom.
Stills are going missing, the Ambients’ protection is wearing thin, and Isalie is in the eye of a new storm—one pitting Ambient against Still—that will determine the fate of an entire city.
ramblingmads 