Amber Nicole Books

Amber V. Nicole writes the kind of dark romantasy where the heroine is the monster, and readers love her for it. She is an international and USA Today bestselling author, and her Gods and Monsters series went from indie release to viral BookTok fixture to deluxe hardcover editions, the full modern romantasy trajectory.

The Book of Azrael kicked it off in 2022. Dianna is a shapeshifting monster bound to a very bad man, and Samkiel, known as Liam, is the last God King, weary, scarred, and duty-bound to stop exactly the kind of creature Dianna is. They are forced to work together to find a dangerous artifact before it ends the world. The hook is that Dianna is not a misunderstood good girl. She has a body count and no apologies, which makes the villain romance angle feel earned rather than cosmetic.

The series continues through The Throne of Broken Gods, The Dawn of the Cursed Queen, and The Wrath of the Fallen, with the stakes escalating from artifact hunt to full cosmic war. Nicole plays a long game with her plotting. Threads planted in book one detonate books later, and the emotional damage compounds. A deluxe limited edition of The Book of Azrael got a Goodreads giveaway in early 2026, a sign of how far the series has traveled from its indie roots.

Heat check: this is a slow burn that means it. Book one simmers around a 2 on our spice scale while the tension builds, and later books push into 3 to 4 territory once the dam breaks. The vibe is high-stakes yearning between two immortals who could each destroy the other and keep choosing not to. If Kerri Maniscalco or Jasmine Mas worked for you, this is a natural next read.

What makes Nicole matter to the genre is her commitment to actual darkness. Plenty of books market a morally gray heroine and deliver a softie with a knife. Dianna stays sharp. The books ask whether monstrous people deserve love without pretending the monstrous part away, and that honesty is why the fanbase is so loyal. The prose is more serviceable than lyrical, and the books are long, so pacing dips happen. The emotional payoffs cover the check.

The community around these books is half the experience. The Book of Azrael spread the old-fashioned BookTok way, through reaction videos, spoiler-walled discussion, and fan art of Dianna long before trade media noticed, and Nicole has stayed unusually close to that readership, teasing plot threads and celebrating fan theories without ever confirming them. The marketing comparisons to Sarah H. Parker, Jasmine Mas, Penn Cole, and Kerri Maniscalco are accurate as far as vibes go, but her fans will tell you the series' real signature is scale. This is romantasy plotted like an epic fantasy saga, with gods, timelines, and consequences that stretch across millennia rather than a single court intrigue.

She also deserves credit for how she handles the villainess label. Plenty of authors promise a dark heroine and quietly redeem her into harmlessness by book two. Nicole lets Dianna stay dangerous while still growing, which is a harder writing trick than it looks, and it is the reason the character keeps showing up on best-of lists for morally gray leads. If you like your heroines with genuine teeth, this is the standard other series get measured against, and the reason her name comes up first whenever readers ask for a lead who stays scary after falling in love.

Reading order is straightforward: The Book of Azrael, The Throne of Broken Gods, The Dawn of the Cursed Queen, then The Wrath of the Fallen. Start at the beginning. This is one series where skipping ahead genuinely ruins the architecture.