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Series · dark romance

Wicked Villains

by Katee Robert

The Wicked Villains series by Katee Robert has 6 books and is best read in publication order, starting with Desperate Measures (2019).

Books
6 books
First published
2019
Status
completed
Last checked

Start here: Desperate Measures (2019) — then read straight through in publication order.

Cover of Desperate Measures, the first book in Wicked Villains

Reading order

No reading order has been recorded yet.

About the Wicked Villains series

Wicked Villains is Katee Robert's first big dark-romance hit, and the template she'd later scale up into Dark Olympus: take familiar fairy-tale and Disney-adjacent archetypes, strip away the moralizing, and hand the story to the "villain" instead of the hero. Set in the fictional Carver City, each standalone-but-interconnected book pairs a reimagined antagonist — Jafar, Captain Hook, the Beast, the Sea Witch, the Red Queen — with a partner navigating kink, power exchange, and consent-forward BDSM dynamics for the first time. The books share a loose criminal-underworld setting and recurring secondary characters, but each is written to be read alone.

Published in a concentrated burst across 2019 and 2020, Wicked Villains built the readership and reputation that let Robert later launch Dark Olympus at a much larger scale. It's darker and more explicitly kink-focused than her O'Malleys mafia romances, closer in tone and structure to Dark Olympus than to her earlier category-romance work.

How to read this series

Publication order works well: Desperate Measures, Learn My Lesson, A Worthy Opponent, The Beast, The Sea Witch, Queen Takes Rose. Each book is a standalone romance built around a different reimagined villain, so any entry point works, but reading in order lets you track the recurring Carver City cast and easter eggs between couples. No connection to Dark Olympus, the O'Malleys, or A Deal with a Demon — this is its own closed universe.

Frequently asked questions

How many books are in the Wicked Villains series?

Six: Desperate Measures (2019), Learn My Lesson (2019), A Worthy Opponent (2020), The Beast (2020), The Sea Witch (2020), and Queen Takes Rose (2020). The series is complete.

What order should I read Wicked Villains in?

Publication order — Desperate Measures, Learn My Lesson, A Worthy Opponent, The Beast, The Sea Witch, Queen Takes Rose. Each book stands alone with its own couple, so you can also jump to whichever villain interests you most.

Is Wicked Villains connected to Katee Robert's Dark Olympus series?

No shared characters — Wicked Villains is set in Carver City and reimagines fairy-tale villains, while Dark Olympus reimagines Greek mythology in a modern Olympus. They share a tone and explicit BDSM content but are separate universes.

What kind of heat level does Wicked Villains have?

Very explicit. The series centers consent-forward BDSM and power-exchange dynamics and is one of Robert's spicier series, comparable to Dark Olympus.

Is Wicked Villains finished?

Yes — all six books were published between 2019 and 2020 and the series is complete.

Reading order last verified .