Riftborn Books in Order

Riftborn shifts the action from sorcerers and ancient gods to a different kind of power: the Rift, a strange dimension that overlaps our own and leaves its mark on those it touches.

The series centers on Lucas Rurik, once a feared member of the Raven Guild, a group of riftborn operatives who policed threats moving between Earth and the Rift. Seven years before the first book, someone wiped out the entire Guild and left Lucas as the only survivor. He walked away from that life and tried to keep to the edges of things, carrying a lot of guilt and anger he’d rather not talk about.

In The Last Raven, an old friend from the Rift‑Crime Unit drags Lucas back into the field after agents start dying in bizarre attacks. The investigation forces him to use the abilities he’s tried to bury and puts him back on the trail of the people behind his Guild’s massacre. From there, each book pushes him deeper into overlapping conspiracies involving the Rift, Earth governments, and beings known as Ancients—some of the oldest and most powerful rift‑fused entities in existence.

Riftborn stories play out like hardboiled detective novels wrapped in dark fantasy. Lucas works crime scenes, interviews witnesses, and navigates inter‑agency turf wars, but the suspects might be revenants, cult leaders, or creatures that stepped through a tear in reality. Allies such as chained revenant Nadia and former FBI agent Emily West give the series a team dynamic, but Lucas’s history means he’s always a little removed, wary of getting people he cares about killed.

Across Blessed Odds, A Talon’s Wrath, Promise of Vipers, and A Murder of Crows, the stakes escalate from local murders to cults determined to reshape both worlds and mad scientists willing to experiment on the very fabric of the Rift. Lucas keeps being thrown into deals he doesn’t want to make and rooms he’d rather walk out of, using grim humor and stubbornness to get through cases that would break most people.

You don’t need to have read the Hellequin books to follow Riftborn, but there are quiet nods to the wider universe for long‑time readers. If you like your urban fantasy heavy on investigation, moral gray areas, and bruised, capable leads, this series is McHugh’s most overt dive into fantasy noir.