Nightshade (Keri Lake) Books in Order

Nightshade is where Keri Lake goes full gothic paranormal. The series opens in a dark, godless city where the borders between the mortal world, purgatory, and something even worse feel dangerously thin. Angels do not show up here as bright, safe creatures. They are beautiful, frightening, and tied to rules that make love feel like a sentence.

At the center are Farryn and Jericho Van Croix. Farryn has spent her life chasing signs and trying to make sense of the inexplicable things her father once told her. Jericho lives apart in a decaying cliffside cathedral and carries himself like the answer to every warning she was ever given. Their attraction is immediate, but acting on it is forbidden in ways that matter to body, soul, and survival.

Everything here feels half holy and half damned.

Nightshade is built around that tension. The first book is about investigation, temptation, and the slow unveiling of what this world really is. Infernium pushes the story deeper into pain and madness when the action turns toward a feared asylum, old sins, and a darkness growing inside Farryn that even Jericho may not be able to stop.

The setting does a lot of work. You get a ruined cathedral, a city soaked in decay, whispers of messengers and fallen beings, and a sense that the world itself is spiritually off balance. Lake leans hard into mood, so the series feels heavy with shadow, stone, and old grief.

In tone, this is gothic paranormal romance with a strong fantasy edge. There is forbidden love, religious imagery, violence, obsession, and a love story that keeps asking whether salvation and ruin might be the same road. If you want bright, breezy paranormal, this is not it. If you want something feverish and atmospheric, it absolutely is.

The love story is the wound and the cure.

Read the duology in order. The emotional arc belongs to Farryn and Jericho from start to finish, and the second book lands best when you have lived through the first book's slow burn, reveals, and growing sense that every answer comes with a worse question attached.