Christine Feehan
Christine Feehan is an author.
Seven series, six of them number one on the New York Times list: Christine Feehan's career is a fact about method rather than about luck. She writes paranormal romance and paranormal military thrillers on a schedule, and by January 2020 she had eighty published novels behind her.
The Carpathian books are the foundation and a large part of the reason the subgenre looks the way it does. Dark Magic, Dark Secret, Dark Melody, Dark Curse, Dark Storm, Dark Lycan and a long line of others run on one premise: an ancient predatory male, a woman who is the only person able to anchor him, and a bond the books treat as biological fact rather than as a choice anybody makes. That is either the entire appeal or the immediate dealbreaker, and Feehan has never pretended it is anything softer than it is.
The other series vary the machinery. GhostWalkers (Conspiracy Game, Deadly Game (GhostWalkers, Book 5)) swaps the vampires for enhanced soldiers and reads like a military thriller with a romance welded on. Sea Haven (Water Bound, Fire Bound (Sea Haven)) is elemental and slower. The Leopard books (Savage Nature, Cat's Lair (Leopard People)) are the most feral. Shadow Keeper (A Shadow Riders Novel Book 3) belongs to the Shadow Riders, and Torpedo Ink opened with Judgment Road straight in at number one.
What she does better than her imitators is momentum. The prose is not going to win prizes, the alpha-male mechanics have aged unevenly, and plots repeat across series. But the books are built so that a reader who opens one at nine in the evening is still reading at one in the morning, and that is craft rather than accident.
Books (14)
- Dark Magic (2000)
- Dark Lycan (2013)
- Water Bound (2010)
- Dark Curse (2008)
- Dark Secret (2005)
- Dark Melody (2003)
- Deadly Game (GhostWalkers, Book 5) (2007)
- Conspiracy Game (2006)
- Dark Storm (2012)
- Cat's Lair (Leopard People) (2015)
- Savage Nature (2011)
- Fire Bound (Sea Haven) (2016)
- Dark Descent (2009)
- Shadow Keeper (A Shadow Riders Novel Book 3) (1918)
Where to start with Christine Feehan
Dark Magic is the practical way in among these titles: early enough that the Carpathian rules are still being explained on the page, and quick enough that you will know within an evening whether the premise works for you. Dark Prince, the first in that series, is missing from the credit list on this page.
If the Carpathians land, Dark Secret and Dark Melody are the strongest of the middle run and Dark Curse is where the mythology gets genuinely large.
If they do not, switch series rather than giving up on her. Conspiracy Game is the GhostWalkers version, closer to a Clancy plot with psychic soldiers in it, and Water Bound is the quietest thing she has written. Cat's Lair (Leopard People) is the one to hand somebody who wants pure genre heat with no apologies attached.