Black Swan Rising Books in Order

Written with Lee Slonimsky under the name Lee Carroll, this trilogy takes Carol Goodman's taste for old legends and hidden histories and drops it into contemporary city life. It begins with Black Swan Rising, when New York jewelry designer Garet James opens a mysterious silver box and discovers that magic has been moving through Manhattan all along.

Garet is a strong lead because she does not arrive in the story feeling powerful or prepared. She is talented, broke, grieving her mother, and trying to keep her small business going. Once the box is opened, she learns that women in her family have long stood watch against a recurring evil, and that her own life has been shaped by forces she never understood. What starts as a private mystery quickly turns into a much bigger reckoning with family legacy, prophecy, and trust.

Then the map gets larger.

In The Watchtower and The Shape Stealer, the story expands from New York to Paris and from personal danger to world-level stakes. Garet's relationship with the vampire Will Hughes becomes one of the emotional anchors of the series, while enemies like John Dee and Marduk keep pushing the books toward darker and more dangerous territory. Along the way there are fey creatures, hidden pathways into the Summer Country, ancient prophecies, and a band of knights trying to hold the line between order and chaos.

What gives the trilogy its particular feel is the texture of the world. Garet works with metal, stones, and design, so objects matter. Symbols matter. Family relics matter. The magic here is tied to craft, inheritance, and place, not just raw power. New York in the first book feels full of secret currents under the familiar streets, and Paris in the later books is just as charged, with gardens, libraries, and old stories turning into part of the plot.

At heart, though, this is still Garet's story. She has to decide whom to trust, what to do with a destiny she never asked for, and how much she is willing to risk for love and for the people around her. Each book raises the scale of the conflict, but the trilogy keeps returning to that personal question of identity. Who is Garet when the story stops treating her like an ordinary woman and starts asking her to stand watch over everyone else?

If you like urban fantasy with romance, art-world detail, and a strong thread of old-world myth, this series lands in a nice middle ground. It has vampires and fair folk, but it also has money problems, grief, family ghosts, and the strange thrill of learning that the city you thought you knew has another map hidden underneath it.