Darkfever
Karen Marie Moning's 2006 series opener kicked off the ten-book Fever sequence and helped define a wave of urban fantasy where ancient Celtic mythology met paranormal romance. MacKayla Lane, a sunny Georgia bartender with a fondness for pink, flies to Dublin after her older sister Alina is found murdered there with no leads. Almost immediately Mac discovers she can see things other humans cannot, the cloaked monsters of the Unseelie Court walking openly through the city, and is dragged into an uneasy alliance with the cold and infuriating Jericho Barrons, a man whose interests in a hidden Fae artifact called the Sinsar Dubh align inconveniently with hers. Moning ramps the world-building, the heat, and the body count steadily across the series, and Darkfever still lands as one of the genre's best gateways. Bold, propulsive, and addictive.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Darkfever
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
After her sister is murdered in Dublin, twenty-two-year-old MacKayla Lane flies to Ireland and discovers she can see the Fae who walk among the human world. Her only ally is a sharp-tongued bookseller named Jericho Barrons.
Darkfever was written by Karen Marie Moning and published in 2006. It is the first book in her Fever series, a long-running urban fantasy and paranormal romance series set partly in Dublin.
Karen Marie Moning's Fever series has more than 12 books and continues to release. The first five form a complete arc following MacKayla Lane; later books expand to other characters in the same world.
Darkfever is 376 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Darkfever takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Darkfever is a standalone novel by an unknown author, not part of a series.
Darkfever is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.