Oddities Emporium Books in Order

Oddities Emporium swaps trailer parks and fairy courts for something a little more gothic and object-driven. The lead here is Jakob Mercer, a human shop owner in Charleston whose store is full of strange artifacts, many of them a lot less harmless than they look.

That is a bad career choice in the best possible way.

What gives the series its identity is the mix of magical object hunt and urban fantasy thriller. One book may hinge on a dead butterfly, another on a ritual knife holding the spirit of a powerful witch, another on dice that open the door to a hidden and deadly network. The artifacts are not background flavor. They are engines for the plot, and each one pulls Jakob deeper into a world he can never fully control.

Jakob is not handling all this alone. Tempest Balfour, a witch, and Gordon Pruitt, a chaotic warlock, become key allies, and the three of them spend much of the series trying to stay alive while dealing with witches, warlocks, church factions, secret societies, and the many people who want what Jakob has in his shop. Charleston matters too. It gives the series a more haunted, layered atmosphere than some of Swain's more openly comic settings.

The books have good forward motion, but they also work because Jakob stays grounded. He is not the strongest magical person in the room. Often he is the ordinary human trying to survive a supernatural problem that is far above his pay grade. That perspective keeps the tension sharp.

If you like relic-driven urban fantasy with a small team at the center, start with Glasswing and then move into Shadow Athame. The series has a strong artifact-of-the-book structure, but the wider conflicts keep building underneath.