Throne of the Fallen: A lot of smut, everywhere, all the time

Author: Kerri Maniscalco

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Throne of the Fallen forms the first book in a sister series of standalones to Kingdom of the Wicked.

This book follows Prince Envy, one of the seven princes of Hell, whose court has been deteriorating for the past few years. He needs a certain object to restore it, and he’s been swept up in a game to win this object back. As part of the game, he needs to get a human artist, Camilla, to paint him a specific picture. Camilla lives in the English-ish town of Waverly Green where she owns a small gallery and is in no mood to deal with Envy as she’s struggling with her own problems, namely an acquaintance who is trying to blackmail her into creating forgeries for him to sell.

Camilla does eventually get pulled into the game and a tentative alliance with Envy as they work together to win, while also, because this is a romantasy, growing attracted to each other and getting closer to uncovering each other’s secrets.

If we’ve learned anything about the setting of Hell and the princes from KotW, it’s that all of their namesake sins from which they derive power tend to come out in somewhat kinky ways. If you liked the last book in the KotW series, the vibes of this book are the most similar to that rather than the first two. While the characters aren’t banging all the time, sex is constantly being mentioned casually or in the background. This seems very much the vibe the author was going for, but may be something for people to be aware of before picking this up if that’s not something you enjoy.

I did generally enjoy this book, the story and the characters, but I do think that having read KotW greatly added to that experience. Already being familiar with the setting and the side characters (in this we get to visit some of the other princes of Hell who we met in KotW), was helpful, and I do think, like many spinoff series, those cameos from already familiar faces is one of the selling points that might not hit as well if someone was being introduced to this world for the first time.