His Fair Assassin Trilogy

I get asked this a lot, so thought I’d try to address it here.

Courting Darkness is meant to be able to be read without having read the original His Fair Assassin trilogy. But it is not the first book of Sybella’s adventures.

If you read an ARC and were lost—I’m sorry. That is one of the absolute downsides to ARCs—they are unfinished and sometimes relatively unpolished copies. I made THREE more rounds of line edits after the ARCs were printed. A large portion of those changes were to help make Courting Darkness more accessible to new readers and help bring former His Fair Assassin readers up to speed.

I think we succeeded in making it less confusing to new readers. But part of that depends on what sort of reader you are.

Some readers hate to read reviews or synopsis and love trying to piece together the backstory from context clues. Others like every detail spelled out and like a lot of explanation in the narrative. There are definitely readers who hit Courting Darkness cold and thoroughly enjoyed it! Where exactly their reader preferences fell on the above spectrum, I’m not sure.

Part of the problem as a writer was finding a way to revisit the events of Dark Triumph without utterly violating who Sybella is as a character. She is an extraordinarily private person whose past was so difficult that she blocked out most of it for four years. Those early memories will never be something she takes out causally to mull over. To have her do so felt like it cheapened her experience, turning it into something exploitative, even though it would have filled readers in on what had happened in her past. But honestly, I think those experiences of hers will mean more if they are experienced with her rather than recounted in a narrative recap.

So I believe (hope?) you can read Courting Darkness first. With luck, you will enjoy it enough that you’ll want to know more about Sybella and give Dark Triumph a try—it will answer so many questions you might have! But it is very likely that reading Courting Darkness will be a richer experience if you’ve read the trilogy first. But if you haven’t, don’t despair! Sybella’s full backstory will be revisited more fully in the second book in the duology—when events give her no choice but to confront it.