Hannah Nicole Maehrer Books

Hannah Nicole Maehrer started posting short improvised sketches on TikTok in June 2021 under the handle hannahnicolemae, playing the overworked personal assistant to a fantasy villain. The bit was simple, the delivery was very good, and it kept running. Two years and a large following later, the novel version of Assistant to the Villain was published in August 2023 through Entangled, and it went straight onto the New York Times list. Apprentice to the Villain followed in 2024 and Accomplice to the Villain in 2025. The series is now in development as a feature film with Amazon MGM Studios, with John Wick writer Derek Kolstad attached to the script.

What defines the writing is that it is a workplace comedy wearing a fantasy costume. The villain has an HR problem. There is a filing system. Somebody has to manage the payroll for the henchmen. Maehrer takes the joke seriously enough to build actual plot out of it, and the sketch origin shows in the structure: short chapters, a strong running-bit discipline, and scenes that are built around a punchline rather than around a beat of tension. Whether that reads as delightful or as thin depends entirely on how much you enjoy the central joke, and readers are genuinely split on this.

Evie Sage takes a job as personal assistant to The Villain after her father falls ill and she needs the money, which is the most relatable inciting incident in modern fantasy. The Villain, who is never given a name for most of the first book, is menacing in theory and increasingly unable to maintain it in practice. The romance is a straightforward grumpy and sunshine pairing with a boss-and-employee complication that the books handle more carefully than you might expect. The later volumes widen the scope, bring in a proper antagonist and let the emotional material get heavier, which is the right call, though some readers preferred the lighter first instalment.

On heat, this is around a 2 on our spice scale. The first book is almost entirely tension, with the temperature rising as the series continues. It is not a spice-forward read and nobody should pick it up expecting one. What it has instead is a very high volume of yearning per page, which for a lot of readers is the better trade.

The honest criticism is worth stating too. The prose is serviceable rather than polished, the worldbuilding is thin by design, and the plot mechanics of the first book would not survive close inspection. None of that is a secret and none of it seems to bother the intended reader, but it does mean that people arriving from denser fantasy often find the book slighter than the hype prepared them for. Treat it as a comedy first and a fantasy second and the mismatch goes away.

She matters as the friendliest possible entry into villain romance. Readers who are curious about morally questionable love interests but put off by the darker end of the shelf can start here safely, and a lot of people did: this book brought a significant number of readers into romantasy who had never read fantasy at all. It is also one of the clearest examples of BookTok functioning as a genuine publishing pipeline rather than just a marketing channel, since the audience existed before the manuscript did.

Where to start: Assistant to the Villain, then Apprentice, then Accomplice, in order and without skipping. The series is serialised in a real sense and the accumulated running jokes are most of the pleasure, so reading out of order will flatten it. Try the first three chapters before committing. The voice is distinctive enough that you will know very quickly whether you want three books of it.