Dark Olympus

About the Dark Olympus series

Dark Olympus drops the Greek pantheon into Olympus, a corrupt modern city-state run by thirteen ruling families who hide behind godly titles — Zeus, Hades, Aphrodite, Ares — while they carve up power, territory and each other. Each book pairs a named couple pulled straight from myth (Hades and Persephone, Eros and Psyche, Achilles and Patroclus, Hera and Zeus) and drops them into a self-contained arranged-marriage-meets-political-thriller plot: fake relationships that turn real, marriages of convenience that become genuine obsession, and loyalty tested against a city that runs on blackmail and violence. Katee Robert writes it ultra-spicy and unapologetically indulgent — explicit, kink-positive, and structured so that the couple's chemistry, not the city's politics, is always the point.

The appeal is the mythology-retelling hook combined with romance readers' favorite tropes: forced proximity, marriage of convenience, morally gray power players, and found family among the Thirteen. Persephone's transformation from naive senator's daughter to Hades' co-ruler in Neon Gods kicked off a phenomenon, and each subsequent book widens the world — new families, new corners of the city, new couples — while keeping cameos from earlier pairs so the found-family thread deepens as the series goes. It's for readers who want their smut with a real plot attached, and who like their gods petty, horny, and dangerous.

How to read this series

Publication order is reading order here — the Thirteen's politics escalate book to book, and characters from earlier pairings keep showing up in supporting roles, so going in order pays off even though every book is a complete, self-contained romance. The prequel novella Stone Heart (Medusa and Calypso, #0.5) is set before Neon Gods but was published after several main-series books; it's entirely optional and can be read whenever, including last, without losing anything. New readers who just want the phenomenon that started it all should begin with Neon Gods (Hades and Persephone) and continue straight through in number order to Shattered Gods, the tenth and final novel.