Kerri Maniscalco grew up in a semi-haunted house in New York, which she credits for a lifelong taste for the gothic, and it shows in everything she has published. Her debut, Stalking Jack the Ripper, arrived in 2016 through James Patterson's imprint and hit #1 on the New York Times list its first week. The series follows Audrey Rose Wadsworth, a young lady of 1880s London who would rather perform autopsies in her uncle's laboratory than pour tea, and it grew across four books, Hunting Prince Dracula, Escaping from Houdini, and Capturing the Devil, into one of the defining YA historical mystery series of its era, complete with a slow-burning romance in Thomas Cresswell that readers still argue ranks among the genre's best book boyfriends.
Maniscalco's real superpower is voice. Her heroines are sharp, curious, and a little transgressive for their settings, and her love interests flirt like it is a competitive sport. She writes banter-forward romance wrapped in gothic atmosphere, candlelit palaces, dissection rooms, demon courts, and she paces her books like thrillers, which is why they get devoured in a sitting despite their page counts. The other constant is the mystery engine. Audrey Rose solves murders with forensic science decades ahead of polite society's comfort, Emilia hunts her sister's killer through demon courts, and even her standalone romances tend to hide a puzzle at the center, so the romance and the investigation pull the reader forward together.
Kingdom of the Wicked, launched in 2020, moved her from historical mystery into full romantasy and became a BookTok fixture. Emilia, a Sicilian witch hunting her twin sister's killer, summons the demon prince Wrath, and the trilogy, Kingdom of the Wicked, Kingdom of the Cursed, and Kingdom of the Feared, rides the enemies-to-lovers arc from simmer to full boil. The heat escalates sharply across the series, which is worth knowing going in: book one is a tease, book two turns explicit, and by the finale it is unmistakably adult. Our spice guide exists for exactly this kind of series, since the trilogy travels from about a 2 to a 4.
Her adult era began properly with Throne of the Fallen in 2023, set in the same universe and following the Prince of Envy, and continued with Throne of Secrets, starring Gabriel Axton, the Prince of Gluttony, on a deadly hunt with the rival who shares a dark memory with him. The Prince of Sin books are steamy standalones, sitting around a 4 on the spice scale, and Throne of Secrets was named among Amazon's best romantasy books of 2026 so far. Each book takes on a different one of the seven demon princes, a structure with obvious room to run for years, and her readership is clearly settled in for the whole tour.
For romantasy readers, Maniscalco matters because she bridges audiences. Plenty of readers met her at fifteen through Audrey Rose and are now reading her demon princes as adults, and she has managed the YA-to-adult transition better than almost anyone in the category. Her books are also a reliable recommendation for mystery readers curious about romantasy, since nearly everything she writes has a whodunit engine under the romance.
Start where your tastes point. For gothic mystery with slow-burn romance and minimal heat, begin with Stalking Jack the Ripper and read all four in order. For witches, demons, and escalating spice, start Kingdom of the Wicked and finish the trilogy before touching the Prince of Sin books, which stand alone but land better with the world established. However you enter, expect velvet, knives, a mystery worth solving, and a love interest who is far too pleased with himself about all of it.
