Kristen Ciccarelli Books

Kristen Ciccarelli dropped out of college and worked as a baker, a potter, and a bookseller before selling her first novel, a resume that sounds invented for an author bio but happens to be true. She debuted with The Last Namsara in 2017, a dragon fantasy about a king's daughter who lures dragons with forbidden stories, which earned strong reviews and grew into the three-book Iskari series. For years she was a well-regarded midlist fantasy author from the Niagara region of Ontario. Then BookTok found Heartless Hunter, and everything changed scale. That trajectory, quiet debut to genre-defining hit seven years later, has made her a favorite example of how deep backlists suddenly matter when an author breaks.

Ciccarelli writes romance as collision. Her books put two people on opposite sides of something absolute, a law, a war, a religion, and let the attraction do structural damage. Story itself is her other obsession: the Iskari books treat tales as literally dangerous things that demand a price when spoken aloud, and that mythic sensibility carries into everything she writes. Her prose is cleaner and quieter than the genre average, which makes the emotional spikes hit harder when they come. She has talked openly about writing through years of modest sales before the breakout, and the patience shows in how controlled the Crimson Moth books are; nothing in them reads rushed to market.

Heartless Hunter (2024) opens the Crimson Moth duology: two years after a revolution overthrew the witch queens, socialite Rune Winters secretly rescues witches from execution as the masked Crimson Moth, while Gideon Sharpe, the revolution's most devoted witch hunter, sets out to unmask her, and courting her seems the fastest way. It debuted as a #1 New York Times bestseller and the conclusion, Rebel Witch (2025), followed it up the charts. The Iskari series, The Last Namsara, The Caged Queen, and The Sky Weaver, remains her deeper cut, plus Edgewood (2022), a moodier standalone about a girl drawn into a cursed forest.

Heat-wise the Crimson Moth books land around 2 to 3 on our spice scale: real on-page tension that goes beyond kissing, though far from the explicit end of romantasy. The Iskari books are tamer YA fare. The draw is the enemies to lovers architecture, and Crimson Moth runs one of the purest versions in the genre, since both leads are actively hunting each other while falling. The mutual deception gives every scene two layers, and the reveal scenes deliver. Rune's double life also means the book gets to play both sides of the masquerade: glittering party scenes with knives underneath, and knife scenes with longing underneath.

For romantasy readers Ciccarelli is core curriculum at this point. Crimson Moth sits comfortably beside Fourth Wing and The Serpent and the Wings of Night on the BookTok shelf, but with a witch persecution story that gives the romance actual moral stakes. She is also a good author for readers who want big feelings without maximum spice, occupying the middle ground between clean YA and full open-door adult. If you keep a reading spreadsheet, file her under duologies that actually end, a rarer category than it should be.

Start with Heartless Hunter and go straight into Rebel Witch; the first ends on a cliff and the duology is complete, so there is no waiting. Then, if you want to see where her voice comes from, work back through Edgewood and the Iskari books, ideally in publication order starting with The Last Namsara. Give the first hundred pages of Heartless Hunter your full attention; the setup work it does there is why the back half lands as hard as it does, and skimming it cheats the payoff.