Heartless Hunter

Heartless Hunter is the first novel of the Crimson Moth series by Kristen Ciccarelli, published in 2024 by Wednesday Books, Magpie and St. Martin's Press. It is a fantasy romance set after a revolution that took witches from rulers to hunted, in a republic that was built on the fear of what they had been.

Rune spends her days pretending to be a vapid young socialite and her nights as the Crimson Moth, a vigilante who smuggles other witches out of the republic. When a rescue goes wrong, she decides the safest place to hide is directly under the nose of the revolution's most implacable witch hunter, by courting him in public. It is a cover story that requires her to be watched constantly by the one person she cannot afford to be read by, and it is a life she keeps separate from the one she shows in drawing rooms.

Gideon Sharpe despises everything Rune pretends to be, and then he finds the cargo hidden in her family's merchant ships. Rather than arrest her, he decides the best way to catch the Moth is to court her back and watch where she leads him. The two of them run the same con from opposite ends, each increasingly sure the other is the villain they have been hunting. Neither of them can afford to be the first to admit what they are doing, and the courtship they have both engineered is the only place they are allowed to be honest by accident.

The novel is the first of the Crimson Moth series, and it establishes the republic, the surviving witches, the two leads and the revolution they are on opposite sides of. It is written as much as a romance as a thriller, with the public courtship and the private investigation running in parallel, and the second book continues the same story with the same pair.