Kerri Maniscalco

Kerri Maniscalco grew up in New York's Hudson Valley in what she's described as a semi-haunted house, with a Sicilian father whose old anatomy books and medical sculptures fed a fascination with forensics that eventually became Stalking Jack the Ripper, the YA gothic mystery series that made her a number-one New York Times bestseller. Kingdom of the Wicked, her romantic fantasy trilogy, draws on that same Sicilian heritage directly: Emilia and her twin sister are secretly practicing witches in a small Sicilian village when the sister is ritually murdered, and Emilia summons Wrath, a Prince of Hell, to help find the killer — a bargain that pulls her into demonic court politics and a slow-burn romance with a love interest who is never fully safe. The trilogy leans into sensory, food-and-magic-soaked Sicilian atmosphere and escalating revenge-plot stakes across Kingdom of the Wicked, Kingdom of the Cursed and Kingdom of the Feared, which should be read in that order as one continuous story. It's the pick for readers who want demon-court romantasy with real sisterly stakes behind the vengeance plot, rather than romance for its own sake. New readers unfamiliar with her work entirely can start here without needing Stalking Jack the Ripper first — the two series share an author but no world or characters. Maniscalco's books have been translated into more than twenty languages and viewed hundreds of millions of times on TikTok.