The Runemaster Books in Order

The Runemaster books form Kerr's second contemporary fantasy series, set again in the San Francisco Bay Area but with a darker, more intimate feel than the Nola O'Grady novels. Where Nola fights Chaos on a cosmic scale, these stories focus on one young woman whose body and past have made her a magnet for occult trouble.

Maya Cantescu is an art student who has always had more secrets than she can comfortably manage. She lives with a rare disease that makes her dependent on blood and vulnerable to sunlight, giving her life a quasi vampiric shape even before magic enters the picture. Her father, a scholar obsessed with ritual magic, has left her wary of the occult, but she cannot quite escape it.

In Sorcerer's Luck Maya discovers that her own latent talent for sorcery is stronger and stranger than she realized. A series of mysterious magical attacks on an Icelandic runemaster named Tor Thorlaksson brings her into his orbit. Tor works with traditional runes and Nordic magic, yet the forces targeting him do not fit neatly into any one tradition. As Maya helps him track the source of these assaults, she is forced to confront the true nature of her illness and the way it connects to forces that have plans for both of them.

The relationship between Maya and Tor is at the center of the series. He offers a measure of safety and training, but his own past is full of dangerous entanglements, and he knows more about Maya's condition than he initially reveals. Their dynamic is part partnership, part mentorship, and part romance, complicated by questions of trust and autonomy.

Sorcerer's Feud picks up with the consequences of Maya having killed a man with magic in self defense. That act has awakened interest from human authorities and from entities that move along older, more supernatural lines. At the same time, Tor's family history surfaces in the form of a powerful spirit from the distant past that wants to claim him. Maya must protect herself from prosecution and predatory magic while helping Tor break free of a legacy that could cost both of them their lives.

Across both books, Kerr grounds the supernatural in a very recognizable Bay Area, with art studios, crowded apartments, and commutes sitting beside runic circles and astral confrontations. The magic system draws on Norse symbolism, blood, and the interplay between will and pattern rather than on the Deverry concept of dweomer, giving this series its own flavor.

Readers who enjoy urban fantasy that leans toward the uncanny and personal rather than the epic will find The Runemaster a compact, character driven duology about illness, consent, inherited guilt, and the uneasy gifts that come with power.