Susanne Valenti Books

Susanne Valenti is one half of the most commercially successful writing partnership in modern indie romantasy. She writes with her sister Caroline Peckham under the joint name their readers gave them, the Twisted Sisters, and between them they have published more than fifty novels and sold in excess of fifteen million books. They are based in the UK, work out of a writing setup in the English countryside, and co-own their own publishing house, King's Hollow. That last detail matters more than it sounds. They built the machine as well as the books, which is why the release schedule has stayed brutal for years while traditionally published authors put out one title a year.

What defines the work is emotional violence delivered with total commitment. The Twisted Sisters write love-to-hate characters, cliffhangers that arrive at the worst possible moment, and dark humour running underneath scenes that should be unbearable. Their reputation is for the happily ever after that makes you suffer first, and they earn it. Bullying arcs are real bullying, not a misunderstanding cleared up in chapter four. Redemption has to be paid for over several books. Readers who bounce off their work usually bounce off exactly this: it is a long, deliberate accumulation of cruelty before anything softens, and the payoff is deferred further than most romance readers expect.

Zodiac Academy is the entry point and the phenomenon. Twin sisters discover they are fae heiresses and enter a magical academy where the existing power structure has no interest in accommodating them. It became a BookTok sensation and dragged the entire academy subgenre back into the spotlight. Ruthless Boys is the other major line, darker and more contemporary in flavour, and the two share a universe. The catalogue extends well past those two into dark romance and fantasy across dozens of connected books, which is either wonderful or overwhelming depending on your tolerance for long series.

Heat is high. On our 0 to 5 spice ratings these books sit at a 4 and frequently a 5, with explicit content that is frequent, detailed, and central to the relationship arcs rather than decorative. Many of their series are why choose rather than single-pairing, so the heroine ends up with multiple love interests and the story treats that as the destination rather than a phase. Content warnings genuinely apply: bullying, assault, coercion, and on-page violence appear throughout. This is not a subtle shelf and it does not want to be.

Their significance to a romantasy audience is hard to overstate. Zodiac Academy proved that indie authors could out-sell traditionally published fantasy romance without a single bookstore table, purely on reader evangelism, and a large chunk of the current indie romantasy boom is people following that template. They also normalised structural choices that were niche five years ago: extremely long series, multi-POV rotation, why-choose as a mainstream option rather than a subgenre, and cliffhangers that assume the reader will simply buy the next one immediately. Whether you love the books or not, the market you are shopping in was shaped by them.

Start with Zodiac Academy book one, and go in knowing that the first book is the slowest and the least representative. Most readers who quit quit there; most readers who push through to book three end up finishing all of them. Read in publication order, because the series interlocks with the spin-offs and Ruthless Boys shares characters. If the academy setting is the draw more than the reverse harem structure, the dark academia shelf has gentler options. If you are unsure whether this level of cruelty and heat suits you, take the reader quiz first; these are books that people either adore or abandon at speed, and there is very little middle ground.