Holly Lisle Books in Order

Ordinary parents Minerva and Darryl Kiakra are swept into a crisis involving dragons and alternate realities. With their children kidnapped and opposing factions threatening them, they must challenge forces far beyond their familiar suburban lives.

After plague destroys her village, young shepherd Faia unleashes a devastating burst of magic. Taken to a school for mages, she struggles with her extraordinary power and hostile classmates while mysterious deaths threaten the institution.

Faia and fellow wizard researchers follow a group of outcast children into the jungle in search of a legendary lost city. Their expedition discovers that the buried history of Arhel’s First Folk remains dangerously alive.

Devil’s Point’s supernatural amusement park draws visitors with real mermaids, a petting zoo of extinct animals, and an exclusive attraction called Desire Point. This comic fantasy continues the series’ exploration of otherworldly beings living on Earth.

Mall bookseller Jim Franklin encounters a working spellbook, thieving elves, a monster, and a fugitive from another era. He has five days to prevent the worlds of magic and physics from colliding with disastrous consequences.

Faia wants to raise her daughter in peace, but magic across Arhel becomes wildly unstable before disappearing altogether. Investigating the crisis forces the powerful mage to confront the world’s hidden history and the source of its magic.

Nurse Dayne Kuttner bargains with God for mercy toward the damned, only to have her offer taken literally. Reporters, demons, bewildered colleagues, and an unexpected suitor complicate her effort to reconcile eternal punishment with divine love.

Idealistic radio DJ Dan Cooley makes a bargain with Puck, a devil hoping to improve his standing. Dan helps him adapt to life on Earth in exchange for a larger audience, but their successful arrangement carries complications.

Cadence Drake and technical partner Badger accept a lucrative assignment to recover an advanced stolen spaceship. Suspicious medicine shipments turn the search into a dangerous mystery, with unexpected links to the past Cady hoped to escape.

Young diplomat Kait Galweigh uncovers a plot against her powerful family amid a longstanding feud between rival houses. Saving them may require revealing a forbidden supernatural ability that would make her own people turn against her.

Fugitive Kait Galweigh seeks the Mirror of Souls to restore her lost family, while Crispin Sabir pursues it for power. Neither understands that the artifact contains imprisoned sorcerers whose release could unleash an ancient conquest anew.

Kait and her companions confront the soul-consuming magic of the Mirror of Souls as a powerful army gathers to invade the Rich Lands. The Secret Texts trilogy concludes with a struggle against necromancy and mounting conquest.

Lauren Dane crosses a doorway into another reality, while Molly McColl arrives there through kidnapping. Brought together in a realm of magic and monsters, the two women face an evil threatening both that world and Earth.

In Oria, Molly McColl discovers powers tied to a dangerous destiny, while Lauren Dane uses newfound magic to protect her son. Their connected worlds face an immortal predator that feeds on the destruction of entire realms.

Lauren Dane’s effort to restore living magic to Earth draws the attention of ancient enemies across the universes. She and Molly McColl must resist the world-devouring Night Watch in the concluding volume of the World Gates trilogy.

Wraith escapes a society whose wondrous magic depends on the suffering of enslaved people. Befriended by a powerful sorcerer’s son, he helps challenge the empire’s rulers in this prequel to the Secret Texts trilogy.

Phoebe Rain receives threatening calls from an abusive ex-husband who lies comatose far away. Her neighbor, Dr. Alan MacKerrie, initially doubts her fears, until supernatural warnings draw them together against a seemingly impossible stalker.

Detective Jess Brubaker goes undercover as an exotic dancer to investigate serial murders and search for clues about her vanished twin. Former Ranger Hank Kamien assists her, as their growing attraction complicates an increasingly dangerous assignment.

After centuries of war, peace brokers arrive between Talyn’s people and their enemies. The soldier-mage and enemy warrior Gair become entangled in a deceptive settlement whose unfamiliar magic threatens to replace open conflict with enslavement.

Widowed paramedic Dia Courvant meets Detective Brig Hafferty while responding to deadly car crashes. Their attraction is complicated by her past trauma and a warning apparently sent from beyond the grave, raising unsettling questions about trust.

Artist Emma Beck returns to a southern town to investigate her hidden family history. As she grows close to contractor Mike Ruhl, disturbing nighttime whispers suggest that the secrets surrounding her heritage remain dangerously present.

A former slave becomes an oracle with the ability to alter time, discovering a threat to an entire people. Her fate intertwines with Aaran, a tracker searching for his missing sister, as saving others demands an extraordinary sacrifice.

Siblings Genna and Dan enter a forbidden forest at night and uncover their village chief’s bargain with the Nightlings. He has traded his people’s lives for immortality, drawing the children into a struggle between human and nocturnal worlds.

Genna must learn to unite sun and moon magic as the prophesied Sunrider. Escaping a scheme by the nightling rulers takes her into the Sun Wizards’ realm, where her developing powers become crucial to her people’s freedom.

This practical writing guide uses exercises and examples to develop fictional cultures, including religions, philosophies, governments, and daily life. Lisle connects cultural differences to character backgrounds and conflict, helping writers create societies suited to their stories.

Lisle guides fiction writers through constructing languages, from distinctive sounds and names to vocabulary, grammar, sentences, and writing systems. The staged approach lets readers develop only the level of linguistic detail their stories actually require.

This guide addresses plotting before drafting, during writing, and through revision. Lisle explores narrative structures, scene planning, conflict, and techniques for recovering stalled projects, treating plot development as a continuing process rather than a single preliminary task.

Using short practice exercises, Lisle moves from basic scene construction toward more complex storytelling. The course focuses on finding conflict and excitement, choosing meaningful details, and avoiding aimless conversations, excessive exposition, or scenes too thin to engage readers.

After the sudden death of her beloved husband, a young widow discovers a way to reconnect with him. The possibility of renewing their bond offers comfort amid grief, but reclaiming what she lost carries a price.

This collection of writing articles and workshops combines practical craft guidance with lessons from Lisle’s professional experience. Topics include avoiding career mistakes, building sustainable series characters, and improving each new story beyond the work that came before.

A sequence of brief lessons helps writers build a usable outline from an initial idea. Demonstrations and exercises cover character, central concept, opening, ending, and middle, followed by additional techniques for developing conflict and narrative depth.

Cadence Drake accepts what seems like a straightforward rescue job at a luxury vacation resort. Finding the resort and its moon devastated leads her to a countdown that threatens human life throughout the inhabited regions of space.

Lisle offers a character-building method based on motivations and questions that generate story conflict. Exercises move beyond physical trait lists to develop fictional people, demonstrate their personalities through action, and avoid common mistakes in characterization.

A woman who has lost everyone she loved makes a dark bargain to relive an earlier happiness. Failing to remember where her life went wrong reveals an unexpected cost, forcing her to reconsider what she truly wants.

Ten brief fantasy tales bring strange visitors and deceptive objects into familiar surroundings, including a backyard alien, a household ghost, and an unreliable mirror. Unexpected encounters reshape ordinary expectations, revealing dangers and possibilities behind seemingly recognizable creatures and treasures.

Condemned for falling in love and fathering a child, a young man refuses his community’s prescribed death by fire. Sold to a spaceship’s owner for execution, he discovers that its crew and purpose conceal unexpected possibilities.

This fiction-writing course introduces practical worldbuilding through guided exercises, worksheets, and demonstrations. Lisle emphasizes creating the setting details a story needs while keeping preparation manageable, beginning with a small world that can be developed quickly.

Courtesan Suzee Delight kills five powerful administrators during a private summit and faces execution. Her supporters try to save her while planetary leaders demand her death, and the Longview’s owner maneuvers to control the bidding for her sentence.

Former slave Jex joins a team investigating the meaning of Bashtyk Nokyd’s final diagram for the Longview’s owner. Assigned the least desirable task, he and an unlikely companion battle toward clues to the larger mystery.

An exiled philosopher’s kindness toward a girl awaiting execution makes him a condemned fugitive. The Longview’s secretive owner sends his crew to recruit him, placing them directly in the path of the killers pursuing him.

The Longview’s hidden purposes come into focus as Captain Melie confronts the truth about her ship and its owner. Herog searches for a way to defend the City of Furies in the series’ concluding episode.

After the Longview rescues Suzee Delight, Bailey's Irish Space Station offers refuge to the ship and its crew. The Pact Worlds Alliance pursues them, forcing an isolated station and a small band of allies to resist overwhelming force.