Priest Books in Order

The Priest collection is where Sierra Simone leans all the way into one of her biggest obsessions: what happens when faith and desire collide. These books are not gentle inspirational romances. They are explicit, emotionally intense stories about people whose callings, vows, and identities are tangled up with the very feelings they are told to deny.

It starts with Priest, the story of Father Tyler Bell, a young Catholic priest in a small Midwestern parish. Tyler has always believed that following the rules - celibacy, obedience, sacrifice - will keep him and his flock safe. Then Poppy Danforth enters the confessional and, eventually, his life, forcing him to confront the difference between the God he was taught to serve and the longing in his own body and heart. The novel follows Tyler’s crisis in detail, from the first temptation to the painful choices he has to make once he breaks his vows.

Midnight Mass is a novella sequel that revisits Tyler and Poppy after their initial happily ever after. Instead of rehashing the forbidden angle, it deals with what it means to build a marriage on the ashes of a vocation. Tyler grapples with guilt, anger, and the sense that he and Poppy might not be on the same page about what their future should look like, even as their physical connection remains fierce.

The later full-length novels Sinner and Saint move the spotlight to Tyler’s brothers. Sean Bell in Sinner is a wealthy, irreverent man who has long since lost his faith, only to fall for Zenny, a theology student on the brink of taking religious vows. Their relationship forces both of them to interrogate what holiness, sacrifice, and service actually mean. Saint follows Aiden Bell, who has gone in the opposite direction, abandoning his life and long-time boyfriend Elijah to become a monk. When Elijah walks back into his cloistered world years later, Aiden has to decide whether the God he serves is asking for solitude or something far scarier: an honest, queer love that costs him everything.

A forthcoming installment, Devil, promises another standalone story set in this universe, once again circling questions of vocation, desire, and the price of breaking or keeping vows. Together, the books form a loose collection rather than a tightly serialized series, so you can read them in almost any order while still feeling the emotional through line: people trying to reconcile the sacred and the profane without losing themselves.

This page pulls those threads together with suggested reading paths, content notes, and links to related works like the vampire novella Sanguine, which plays with similar imagery from a paranormal angle. If you are drawn to romances that treat religion as something more than window dressing, the Priest collection is Simone at her most direct and daring.