Bride

Bride is a standalone paranormal romance by Ali Hazelwood, published in 2024 and issued by Sphere and Penguin, among others. It is her first book set in a world of vampires and werewolves rather than the contemporary settings of her earlier novels, and it is built on a marriage of convenience between two peoples who have been managing an uneasy peace.

Misery Lark is the daughter of the Southwest's most powerful Vampyre councilman, and his only one. For years she has lived anonymously among humans, which is the closest thing to freedom she has had. The council needs a marriage to hold its peace with the Weres, and Misery is the daughter it can spare. The alliance is old and fragile, and the wedding is partly theatre that both sides need to keep it standing, which makes the exchange the kind of arrangement both parties expect to resent.

Lowe Moreland is the Alpha she is handed to, and he does not trust her for a second. He tracks every move she makes in his territory, which is sensible, because Misery has reasons of her own for agreeing to the exchange and none of them are political. The two of them spend the book close enough to watch each other, each working to get something back that the marriage was never meant to involve. Neither of them is telling the other the whole truth about what they want from it.

Hazelwood writes the book as a single self-contained story rather than the start of a series, with the couple's negotiations about territory and trust standing in for the politics between the two communities. Misery is an outcast among her own kind as well as among the Weres, which is the position the book keeps returning to. It is a paranormal romance with a mystery at its centre, and it assumes no knowledge of the author's earlier books.