Amber V. Nicole Books

Amber V. Nicole self-published The Book of Azrael in 2022 and watched it detonate on BookTok. The premise flipped the genre's usual setup: instead of a wide-eyed heroine discovering her powers, readers got Dianna, a monster who eats people, serves a world-ending master, and makes no apologies for any of it. Pairing her with Samkiel, the last living god and the most duty-bound man imaginable, gave the book its engine. Hundreds of thousands of ratings later, the series is an international bestseller with special editions, translations, and a fanbase that treats each new installment like a holiday. The hook was Dianna herself, a woman who traded her humanity in a desperate bargain to save her dying sister and has spent centuries as the monster other monsters fear. Readers had spent years asking for morally complicated heroines, and Nicole called the bluff by writing one with an actual body count.

Nicole writes dark fantasy with an open love of horror, video games, and anime, and it shows in her pacing. Her books read like boss fights stacked on top of each other, with banter in between and a body count that keeps rising. What defines her most, though, is the villain romance angle done from the villain's side. Dianna is not a good person learning to be better for a man. She is a predator with a conscience buried deep, and the series lets her stay complicated instead of sanding her down.

The Gods and Monsters series runs through The Book of Azrael, The Throne of Broken Gods, The Dawn of the Cursed Queen, and The Wrath of the Fallen, each book widening the war between old gods, fallen kings, and the creatures caught between them. The story leans on death, resurrection, betrayal, and the kind of cliffhangers that send readers straight to the group chat. Expect graphic violence alongside the romance, because Nicole never pretends her monsters are house-trained. The supporting cast pulls its weight too, from Dianna's fiercely loyal sister Gabby to The Hand, Samkiel's circle of celestial warriors, and Nicole gives her side characters enough life that every loss in the war actually stings.

Heat-wise, this is a true slow burn. The first book simmers for hundreds of pages while Dianna and Samkiel trade hostility and longing, and later books pay that patience off with explicit scenes that push the series to a solid 4 on our book spice ratings. The buildup is the point. Readers who want payoff on page fifty should recalibrate before starting.

Nicole matters to romantasy because she proved the audience would rally behind a heroine who is the monster, not the girl running from one. That has opened the door for a wave of darker, morally inverted romantasy, and her success as a self-published author turned international bestseller is one of the clearest examples of BookTok rewriting publishing's rules. If you love enemies-to-lovers with real fangs, she is essential reading. She has also been refreshingly public about her influences, citing video games and anime as freely as other authors cite the classics, and that fluency shows in fight choreography that reads like it was storyboarded, all momentum and spectacle.

Start with The Book of Azrael and read in publication order, because the series is one continuous story and each book spoils the last. Clear your schedule for the back half of every installment, and maybe do not get attached to anyone. If you are unsure whether her blend of horror and heat fits your taste, our romantasy quiz can help you calibrate, but fair warning: Dianna tends to convert skeptics. Special editions, translation deals, and a devoted online fandom keep multiplying around the series, so the hardest part of starting now may be choosing which edition to buy before the next installment lands.