Allie Therin Books in Order

If you want the best entry point to her 1920s world: Spellbound → Starcrossed → Wonderstruck
If you want a redemption-heavy spin-off romance: Proper Scoundrels → Once a Rogue → Viscounts & Villainy
If you want contemporary urban fantasy and slow-burn tension: Liar City → Twisted Shadows → Edge of Mercy

Allie Therin is a Cuban-American author who writes romance, fantasy, and mystery in the same breath. She grew up in a tiny Pacific Northwest town with more bears than people, a detail she has joked about more than once, and that mix of humor and danger feels true to her books.

Before publishing fiction, she worked a surprisingly wide range of jobs, including attorney, bookseller, Parks & Rec assistant, boom operator, and, for one memorable day, barista.

Her path to writing started with reading. Therin has said she loved romance as a teenager, especially the promise of a happy ending, and she also gravitated toward science fiction and mystery. That blend still explains a lot about her fiction, which likes emotional payoff just as much as it likes a puzzle, a secret history, or a bit of supernatural trouble.

She has also talked about the first novel she wrote, True North, which began as a short story of about 9,000 words and kept growing with each draft. That project helped her figure out plotting and what kind of planning actually worked for her. By the time she wrote Spellbound, her first published novel, she had a clearer sense of how to build a full story from the ground up.

Historical fantasy was not the obvious lane, but the look and feel of the 1920s clicked with the magic system she wanted to write.

Once she committed to that setting, she dug hard into research, from old photos and newspaper archives to the harder-to-find histories that shaped queer and marginalized lives in the period. That care gives her 1920s books real texture without slowing them down.

Readers usually meet her through Spellbound, Starcrossed, and Wonderstruck, the trilogy now known as Magic in Manhattan. Those books follow Arthur Kenzie, a former WWI soldier, and Rory Brodigan, a psychometric antiques expert, through an alternate 1925 New York full of hidden magic and dangerous relics. People who like period atmosphere, found family, and romance under pressure tend to feel at home there fast.

She later returned to that world with Proper Scoundrels, Once a Rogue, and Viscounts & Villainy, which focus on Sebastian de Leon and Lord Fine, Wesley, two prickly men carrying more guilt than either would say out loud. Then she changed gears with the Sugar & Vice trilogy, beginning with Liar City, and moved into an alternate Seattle where empaths are feared, regulated, and hunted. One series leans historical, one more modern, but both show the same interest in tension, tenderness, and stubborn people learning to trust.

A lot of Therin's fiction returns to the same questions. What does power do to someone who never asked for it? What does shame hide? How do wary people build trust when the world keeps rewarding secrecy? Her Cuban-American heritage has also shaped characters such as Sebastian and Evan, and that personal thread helps her fantasy worlds feel lived in.

Off the page, she has described herself as a parent, and she still comes across as someone who enjoys odd research rabbit holes, talking books with readers, and sharing the occasional cat photo.