Katharine McGee Books in Order

If you want a modern royal saga: American Royals → Majesty → Inheritance → Rivals → Reign.
If you like futuristic high rise drama: The Thousandth Floor → The Dazzling Heights → The Towering Sky.
If you prefer historical royal romance: A Queen's Game → A Queen's Match.

Katharine McGee grew up in Houston, Texas, where she spent more time in the library than anywhere else. As a kid she was the reader with a stack of books taller than she was, dreaming about faraway worlds and glittering cities.

At Princeton University she studied English and French literature, happy to be reading for homework as well as for fun. After graduating in 2010, she moved to New York and took an editorial assistant job, learning the publishing business from inside big houses instead of watching from the outside.

Those first years were spent at HarperCollins and then Alloy Entertainment, where she helped shepherd other people's stories onto the shelves. She worked on tie in novels for series like The Vampire Diaries and Pretty Little Liars, studying how multi book plots, big casts and cliffhangers actually operate on the page.

In New York she was also living in high rise apartment buildings, riding elevators with neighbors whose lives she hardly knew. When she read about an ambitious skyscraper project in China that imagined an entire city stacked inside one tower, the idea collided with those New York daydreams and became the seed of The Thousandth Floor.

McGee began drafting the book at night while keeping her day job and later carried the project with her to the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she completed an MBA. That training in structure and long term planning suited her natural instincts as a plotter who likes color coded outlines and big story maps before she ever writes chapter one.

When the novel finally reached readers in 2016, it launched a trilogy set in twenty second century Manhattan, inside a thousand story tower where status is measured by the floor you live on. Across The Thousandth Floor, The Dazzling Heights and The Towering Sky, she follows teens whose secrets, addictions and romances connect across those levels, blending glossy futurism with questions about class, surveillance and what it means to be seen.

Her next project, the American Royals series, shifted from the future to an alternate present. Starting with American Royals and continuing through Majesty, Rivals, Reign and the prequel novella Inheritance, McGee imagines a United States that crowned George Washington king. The books center on Princess Beatrice, her younger siblings Samantha and Jefferson, and the friends and rivals orbiting them as they juggle tabloids, tradition and the pull between love and duty.

Most recently she turned to real history with A Queen's Game and A Queen's Match, a Victorian era duet about Alix of Hesse, Hélène d'Orléans and May of Teck. These novels follow three young women as they travel between European courts, falling in love, making mistakes and discovering how little control they have over their own futures in a world run by queens and grandmothers.

Across all of her work, McGee gravitates to big ensembles, overlapping points of view and closed worlds filled with pressure, whether that means a palace, a supertower or a royal court. Her stories are packed with romance and drama, but they stay grounded in the private fears of characters who are constantly on display.

She now lives back in Houston with her husband, Alexander Field, and their two sons. Most days she writes from home with a mug of coffee and a pair of fuzzy slippers under her desk, still building intricate fictional worlds from the same bookish curiosity that first sent her to the library.