C.S. Pacat Books

C.S. Pacat's career started in a way that would now be unremarkable and was then unusual: Captive Prince began as a free web serial, built a large readership through word of mouth, and was picked up for traditional publication on the strength of that audience. Born in Australia and educated at the University of Melbourne, Pacat has lived in Tokyo and Perugia and now writes in Melbourne. She has since become a USA Today bestselling author, written for DC Comics, and created the Fence graphic novels, which earned a GLAAD Media Award nomination. The web serial to major publisher path is common now. In 2013 it was proof of concept.

Captive Prince is the work that matters most to this audience, and it is worth being precise about what it is. Damen is the rightful heir to Akielos, betrayed and sent as a slave to the neighboring court of Vere, where he is given to Prince Laurent, who does not know Damen's identity and has every reason to hate him. The trilogy, continuing through Prince's Gambit and Kings Rising, is a political thriller with a romance at its center, and the romance is built almost entirely out of information asymmetry. Laurent's intelligence is the real engine of the books. Very few authors trust a reader to sit with a character this unpleasant for this long before the picture resolves.

What defines Pacat's writing is patience and structure. She withholds better than almost anyone in the genre. Captive Prince is the slow burn that later books get compared to, and the first volume is deliberately uncomfortable in ways that pay off across the full arc. Her Dark Rise series, beginning with Dark Rise in 2021 and continuing with Dark Heir in 2024, moves to nineteenth-century London with an ancient-war premise and a young adult framing, and it applies the same structural discipline to a different register. The twists in Dark Rise are properly set up rather than sprung.

On heat, the answer depends on which series. Captive Prince is adult and sits at 3 to 4 on our spice scale, with explicit content that arrives late and matters when it does. The first book contains non-consensual and dubiously consensual content involving secondary characters, plus slavery as a central institution, and readers should know that going in rather than discovering it. Dark Rise is young adult and much milder, closer to 0 or 1. Treating them as interchangeable will lead someone badly astray.

For a romantasy audience, Pacat is close to required reading. The enemies-to-lovers architecture that dominates the current genre owes a substantial debt to Captive Prince, and a very large number of the m/m fantasy romances published since 2015 are working in its shadow. She also demonstrates something the genre often forgets, which is that a romance gets more powerful the longer the author refuses to resolve it. If you want more in that vein, the enemies-to-lovers collection is a reasonable next stop.

Where to start: Captive Prince, then Prince's Gambit, then Kings Rising, strictly in order. The first book is the hardest and the least satisfying on its own, and readers who stop there consistently misjudge the trilogy. The general advice from long-time readers is to reach the end of the second book before deciding, because that is where the withheld information starts paying out and where Laurent becomes legible. If the content warnings rule that out, start with Dark Rise instead, which is standalone-ish in tone and considerably gentler, and which will give you Pacat's plotting without the slavery premise. Fence is a separate pleasure entirely, a sports comic about competitive fencing with a queer ensemble, and it needs no prior reading at all.