What if a rancher’s daughter discovered that monsters were real?
Chloe Fortebat left her father’s ranch in Silberne with nothing but her horses, her knive, and a mysterious inheritance. She expected to find a new life in the Old World. What she found instead were werewolves, necromancers, and a sharp-dressed monster hunter who would change everything. This is the story of how a pragmatic frontier woman became the co-protagonist of the Hunter Healer King trilogy.
A 40-foot mecha dances to Slavic-inspired folk music in this music video from the Hunter Healer King trilogy. The Armor of Arent has been waiting for a worthy pilot. Now it has one. 🎬 Created with AI tools (Midjourney + Suno) 📚 From the gaslamp fantasy series by Mel Dunay! The Hunter Healer King trilogy combines steampunk monster hunting with slow-burn romance. For fans of Patricia Briggs and Lindsay Buroker.
The name’s Chloe Fortebat, and I don’t understand this place at all. Maxim and I are engaged, but there’s a problem: his late mother may be too closely related to my mother. We need answers about her past, but she abandoned me as a child, and we don’t know where she is now. Meanwhile, a candidate for Emperor was attacked by a vicious beast, and Maxim’s friend the Prime Minister is pushing him forward as a replacement. I think Maxim would be good at it, but right now, we have bigger problems. We have to find my mother, and stop the monster stalking this city. But neither the monster nor my mother may be what we expected. My name is Dr. Maxim os Storm, and I hunt the beasts that haunt the night. I want to marry Chloe more than anything, but first we must find her mother, who vanished years ago under suspicious circumstances. As we investigate, the questions multiply. What creature killed one man and mauled another near the Beast Garden? What is the meaning of the signet ring marked with a face that is half woman, half dragon? Why does the Prime Minister want to thrust the Imperial Crown onto my head? But Chloe’s courage never wavers, no matter what ancient horrors await us. We will find the answers we seek, and face the darkness together.
To me, AI is a flawed but interesting tool, brought to us by the same flawed (and often corrupt) people who brought us the rest of the modern conveniences we live with. Other people have other opinions about it, and out of respect for them, I try to be transparent about my use of AI.
I do not use AI for first draft writing or for high-level concept and character background work. I have found ai chatbots (mostly Claude.ai) helpful for tasks like:
Religion is not at the foreground of the stories I tend to tell, but it is in the background, part of the “vibe,” so to speak. I tend to stick to versions of a specific cosmogony (Creator+quasi angels+quasi devils), partly because it reflects my own Catholic beliefs, but also frankly because my world-building energy is limited, and most of the time, I’d rather spend it elsewhere.
Disclaimer: I do not have children, and when I was a child/teenager, I was an extreme misfit, so take what follows with a truckload of salt, and keep in mind that this is meant as kind of a wistful “would be nice if this were the case” rather than “rawr, my way or the high way, there oughtta be a law.”
Note: Persuasion is very much tied to historical events, including the naval activities of Wentworth and his brother-in-law Admiral Croft. I basically agree with Ellen Moody’s chronology of the book.
All of these are more or less readable, in my opinion, and at least one of them is generally very high regarded by most people. I’m just not in the mood for any of them very often.
These are basically the books I turn to when I remember all the high-rotation Heyers too clearly. None of them are bad books, and some of them are very highly regarded by other Heyer fans, they’re just not my absolute personal favorites.
Jaglion Press 