A Game of Malice and Greed Books in Order

A Game of Malice and Greed is Caroline Peckham's darker, more romantic fairy-tale lane, built from loose Aladdin and Rapunzel bones but shaped into something much nastier. This is not a soft retelling. It is full of palace schemes, curses, gods, bargains, and the kind of romance that gets tangled up with power from the start.

The story pulls together several people who should never have ended up in the same orbit. There is a hidden princess with far less freedom than her title suggests, a rigid royal guard whose sense of duty puts him in direct danger, a thief who expects treasure and gets dragged into politics instead, and an immortal figure bound to gold and long memory. Their lives crash into one another because the empire around them is already cracking.

Everybody wants something. Nobody gets it cleanly.

One of the fun things about this series is how it balances fairy-tale shapes with a bigger fantasy backdrop. Competitions for a princess's hand, forbidden attraction, buried magic, ruined gods, and old curses all matter, but they matter inside a world that feels unstable and hungry. Wishes are never simple here. Neither is love.

The prequel novella A Kingdom of Gods and Ruin adds extra weight by showing the older wound beneath the main story, especially where divine anger and personal grief meet. If you read it, the world opens up in a different way. If you skip it at first, the main book still works as a strong entry point.

The overall tone is dark fantasy romance with multiple points of view, lots of shifting power, and a heavy sense that every decision is going to cost somebody. Readers who want fairy-tale inspiration but also want bite, chaos, and bigger mythic stakes will probably feel at home here.