Below is the complete list of Shantel Tessier books in order. For each series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Dare Books
Publication Order of Dark Kingdom Books
Publication Order of Dash Books
Publication Order of Selfish Books
Publication Order of The Lords Books
Publication Order of Seven Deadly Sins (Shantel Tessier) Books
Publication Order of Undescribable Books
Publication Order of Standalone Books
Publication Order of Short Stories/Novellas Books
About Shantel Tessier
Shantel Tessier is an American romance author best known for dark, high-intensity stories built around obsession, power, secret societies, criminal organizations, and relationships that deliberately push beyond the conventions of mainstream contemporary romance. Her career began with independently published contemporary romances before moving progressively toward the darker material that now defines her work. She is a New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestselling author and lives in Oklahoma with her husband, whom she has known since high school, and their two daughters.
Tessier began publishing in 2013 with Undescribable, the first novel in a series following Samantha Hall and Slade Long. The Undescribable books belong to an earlier phase of her career, when her work leaned more heavily toward contemporary and New Adult romance. The sequence expanded through several connected novels and companion stories, establishing the interconnected-cast approach she would continue using in later series.
Her subsequent bibliography includes the Selfish, Dare, and Seven Deadly Sins books, each exploring volatile relationships through different groups of characters. These novels helped move her fiction toward increasingly darker romantic territory, with possessiveness, revenge, damaged loyalties, dangerous social circles, and morally compromised protagonists becoming more prominent.
The Dark Kingdom series marked another important development. Beginning with Code of Silence, it enters a world of organized crime, family power, violence, and relationships shaped by dangerous obligations. Later installments such as Titan, Grave, Cross, and Bones shift attention among different couples while maintaining a shared criminal environment. The books demonstrate the structure Tessier often favors: a romance may receive its own central narrative, but characters continue to inhabit the same world and the consequences of earlier relationships remain visible.
Her largest breakthrough came with The Ritual, originally published independently in 2021. The novel introduced Barrington University and the Lords, an immensely powerful secret society governed by vows, hierarchy, ritual, and control. Ryat Archer and Blakely became the first central couple in what developed into the L.O.R.D.S. series, whose later novels include The Sinner, The Sacrifice, Carnage, Madness, and Chaotic.
The L.O.R.D.S. books are presented around different principal relationships rather than one couple continuing through every installment, but the underlying society, families, alliances, and previous characters increasingly connect them. That cumulative structure has become important as the series has expanded. Chaotic, published in 2026, continued the Lords world and became an instant New York Times bestseller, reflecting the considerable audience the series has developed since The Ritual first appeared.
Tessier’s writing is firmly aimed at adult dark-romance readers. Her novels frequently contain explicit sexual material alongside violence, coercive behavior, captivity, abuse, revenge, and extreme power imbalances. She provides content warnings for the darker books, an important feature because the relationships are intentionally written within morally transgressive fictional environments rather than conventional romantic circumstances.
Across her bibliography, Tessier has moved from relatively straightforward contemporary romance toward increasingly elaborate interconnected worlds. The earlier Undescribable and Selfish-era books show one stage of that development; Dark Kingdom introduces the criminal and morally gray atmosphere that became more prominent later; and the L.O.R.D.S. novels represent her most recognizable work, combining secret-society mythology with obsessive romance and an expanding network of characters whose stories repeatedly cross.