House of Crimson Hearts (Ruby Roe): Spice Level & Review

Q: Is the Kingdom of Immortal Lovers trilogy finished?

Yes. All three books are out — Hearts in February 2024, Kisses in July 2024 and Curses in December 2024 — plus a prequel novella and a bonus scene collection. The trilogy ends with an HEA.

Verdict: A vampire-and-hunter revenge plot with genuinely magnetic chemistry and 5/5 heat, undercut by a sex-to-plot ratio that swallows its own trials and an ending that stops mid-story.

Best for: Readers who want an explicit sapphic vampire romance above everything else, who can forgive rough line-level craft, and who are willing to commit to three books rather than one.

Heat level: ★★★★★ (5/5 — explicit and plentiful)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.6/5 — a 3.98 Goodreads average against a 3.73 on StoryGraph, and a cliffhanger the packaging never mentions)

Tropes: Enemies-to-lovers, vampire and hunter, second-chance romance, amnesia and erased memory, blood bond and blood addiction, deadly trials, forced proximity, morally grey heroine, dual POV across dual timelines, BDSM and brat dynamics.

House of Crimson Hearts by Ruby Roe is the first book of the Kingdom of Immortal Lovers trilogy, a self-published sapphic vampire romantasy set in Sangui City — a place where three original vampires compete for a throne and a licensed hunter corps polices them — and it runs on the collision between Octavia Beaumont, one of those three originals, and Red, the hunter who has spent years planning to kill the vampire who turned her sister.

It has a 3.98 average across roughly 8,375 Goodreads ratings, a Podium Audio edition that reached listeners six months after the paperback, and a review section that argues with itself far more than that average implies — StoryGraph’s 1,971 readers land it a full quarter-star lower at 3.73. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is House of Crimson Hearts About?

House of Crimson Hearts is urban fantasy in vampire-court clothing, and knowing that in advance solves most of the arguments about it. Sangui City has ancient bloodlines, ritual trials and a coronation at stake, but it also has nightclubs, techno, jeans and jacuzzis, and readers who arrived expecting a period-feeling vampire dynasty repeatedly report the tonal mix as a problem. The book is also, by the author’s own framing on her shop page, adult content first: 400-plus pages rated 5/5 for heat before a single reader got to it.

Red is defined by what was taken from her — a sister turned, a family unravelled, and, it emerges, a stretch of her own past she cannot account for. Octavia is defined by what she assumes she is owed: the city, the crown, and the hunter she once had and lost. The book uses dual first-person POV across two timelines, present-day trials and the history neither woman can discuss, and that structure is what makes the eventual reveal work. It is also the single thing readers most often say confused them on a first pass.

What Makes This Sapphic Vampire Romantasy Work

The chemistry: The most consistent praise in the reviews by a distance. Readers describe the pull between Red and Octavia as physical and constant, and it survives the plot doing very little to help it.
The memory-loss engine: The erased past is the book’s best structural idea — it turns a straightforward dark romance revenge plot into a second-chance one without either lead knowing that is what is happening.
The heat: Rated 5/5 and labelled “explicit and plentiful” by romance.io, its top band. Readers treat the spice as the reason to be here rather than as seasoning.
Cordelia and Eleanor: The historical secondary thread gets named by reviewers as a favourite unprompted, which is unusual for a subplot in a book this heat-forward.
Blood as an addiction mechanic: The bond is written as dependency rather than as destiny, which gives the vampire material an edge the trope usually loses.

Book Synopsis

Red hunts vampires for a living and she is very good at it. The one she actually wants has been out of reach for years: Octavia Beaumont, one of the three original vampires who founded Sangui City, and the woman responsible for what happened to Red’s sister. Red’s plan is simple and it has never changed. Get close enough. Finish it.

Then the city announces the trials that will decide its heir, and the rules pair competitors rather than pitting them one against another. Red is bound to Octavia. Octavia wants the crown badly enough to tolerate a hunter at her shoulder; Red wants proximity badly enough to tolerate the vampire she has promised to kill. Neither of them intends to keep the arrangement past the last trial.

What neither of them can explain is why the proximity feels like recognition. Octavia knows things about Red that Red has no memory of. There is a gap in Red’s own history where something used to be, and everyone with an interest in the outcome of these trials seems to be working around it. The tasks get more lethal. The bond gets harder to read as coincidence. And the question underneath the competition stops being who wins the city and becomes what exactly was taken from Red, who took it, and what happens on the day she finds out.

My Review

The premise is strong and the chemistry delivers on it, and I want to lead with that because most of what follows is qualification. A vampire who wants a throne and a hunter who wants her dead, forced into a competition that requires them to keep each other alive, is a clean engine. Roe writes want convincingly. When Red and Octavia are on the page together the book is genuinely propulsive, and the reason people finish it in two days is not the trials — it is the two of them.

The second real strength is the reveal. The dual-timeline structure earns its complexity in the back third, when the reason Red’s history has a hole in it becomes clear, and the book retroactively converts from enemies-to-lovers into something closer to second-chance romance with the cruelest possible mechanism. That is a real idea, executed. Several readers who came for the spice say plainly that they did not expect the emotional weight, and I believe them.

Where it struggles is the ratio, and this is not my personal impatience — it is the dominant complaint across the reviews. Readers report the leads sleeping together roughly twenty pages in, which strands the enemies-to-lovers premise before it has done any work, and then report sex scenes arriving in the middle of timed, lethal trials, which strands the stakes too. Around that sit the craft complaints: purple prose and repeated tic words named by reviewer after reviewer, grammatical errors, and worldbuilding whose rules for the trials nobody can reconstruct afterwards. StoryGraph logs a 9% did-not-finish rate, tying the highest figure I have recorded on any title reviewed here this month.

Two expectations to reset. First, the enmity: this is sold as true enemies-to-lovers and it is not one. If the hostile phase is what you read the trope for, calibrate hard — if a long antagonistic stretch is what usually keeps you at arm’s length, relax, because there barely is one. Second, and more consequentially, this book does not end. It stops on a reveal, with no happily-ever-after for Red and Octavia, and nothing on the cover or in the blurb warns you. One StoryGraph reviewer’s summary is the fairest description I found: “the story cuts out halfway through.”

My honest note: An excellent hook and two leads with real voltage, delivered inside a book that would rather write the sex scene than finish the trial. If explicit sapphic vampire romance is the whole ask, this clears it easily — but treat it as the first third of one long story, not as a book.

Element	In House of Crimson Hearts
Central relationship	Red & Octavia Beaumont — vampire hunter and original vampire, enemies-to-lovers with an erased history
Core tropes	Enemies-to-lovers, second chance, amnesia, blood bond and addiction, deadly trials, forced proximity, dual POV
Setting	Sangui City — a modern vampire-ruled city where three originals compete for the throne and hunters enforce the law
Heat level	5/5 — explicit and plentiful
Series	Kingdom of Immortal Lovers book 1 — ends on a cliffhanger with no HEA; the trilogy is complete through book 3
Content notes	Graphic sexual content, blood and blood play, addiction and withdrawal, violence and torture, lesbophobia and homophobic violence, brief on-page suicidal ideation, fire and entrapment, death of a parent, consent ambiguity around a blood bond and a third-party voyeur scene

How Dark and Spicy Is House of Crimson Hearts?

A full 5/5. romance.io places it in its top steam band and labels it “explicit and plentiful,” the author’s own shop listing rates it 5/5, and StoryGraph’s crowd files sexual content as graphic — three independent sources agreeing, which is rarer than it sounds. Readers do not treat the spice as a bonus. They treat it as the product, and the most common criticism is not that it is too explicit but that there is too much of it relative to everything else happening.

On the dark side, StoryGraph’s readers mark the book 75% dark, with torture and lesbophobia at moderate and blood play throughout, so this is not gothic atmosphere standing in for content. The element worth flagging in advance is consent: multiple reviewers raise the scene involving a third party who has not meaningfully agreed to be involved, and separately question whether a blood bond that produces literal dependency can be written as desire. That is a real recurring objection, not one voice. Beyond it, no reviewer I found flags kink content outside the BDSM, edging and dom/sub material the author lists openly. For more of this kind of heat, try Her Spell That Binds Me and Tryst Six Venom.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want explicit sapphic vampire romance and are not precious about how much of the page it takes, you read for chemistry and longing over plot mechanics, you enjoy an amnesia or erased-past reveal, and you are happy to start a trilogy you intend to finish.

You may want to skip it if: a cliffhanger with no HEA in book one is a dealbreaker, you need enemies-to-lovers to stay hostile for more than two chapters, unedited prose and repeated tic words pull you out of a story, or you want trials with rules you can actually follow.

In short: a magnetic pairing and a genuinely good twist, inside a book that will not stop for long enough to build the world around them.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (August 2026)

Two and a half years after publication this book is still accumulating readers, and the mechanism is not a single viral moment. It is volume plus format. TikTok has standing discovery pages for the characters, for fan art of Red and Octavia, and for specific scenes, which points to reader-made content rather than author promotion alone, though I could not measure the volume of it from here. Reddit I could not check at all — the network blocks it from this session, so treat the absence of Reddit evidence below as unchecked rather than as a finding. There are no trade reviews: no Publishers Weekly, no Kirkus, no Library Journal, which is normal for a title published through the author’s own Atlas Black Publishing imprint. What did happen is the audio deal. Podium Audio released the audiobook on 6 August 2024, narrated by Allie Rose and Anais Inara Chase across 13 hours 28 minutes, and dual narration is one of the few things in this book’s discourse with no dissenters — listeners single out the two-voice split for making the POV structure legible in a way the page does not.

Prefer audio? Listen to House of Crimson Hearts on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The chemistry, first and most consistently. Reviewers describe the tension as unrelenting and say the longing carries them past everything else. The spice is named as a headline feature — one Goodreads reviewer’s whole verdict is “the spice is off the chart” — and 40% of Goodreads ratings are five stars. Then the twist: readers who expected a smut-forward vampire book repeatedly say the memory reveal hit harder than they were prepared for, and 49% of StoryGraph readers tag the book emotional. The side cast draws real affection, with Cordelia and Eleanor’s historical thread named again and again as the part people wanted more of. And a minority defends the prose everyone else attacks — the blogger Lou Morgan called it “an absolute firecracker of a book” and praised the writing’s passion specifically, which is worth flagging because it is the exact inverse of the loudest complaint.

What readers argue about and complain about: The sex-to-plot ratio, above everything. The recurring formulation is that the trials are the premise and the trials keep getting interrupted, with reviewers pointing at scenes placed inside timed, lethal tasks. Second, and closely related: the enemies-to-lovers label. Readers report the leads together roughly twenty pages in, which means the hostility never gets a chance to generate anything, and several say the honest description is second-chance romance wearing an enemies costume. Third, the prose. Purple phrasing, thesaurus reaching, and a small set of tic words get quoted back so often they function as a shorthand for the whole objection, alongside grammatical errors and a general sense that another editing pass was needed. Fourth, the worldbuilding: nobody can reconstruct the trials’ rules afterwards, and the medieval-feeling vampire court sitting alongside techno and jacuzzis reads to many as inconsistent rather than as deliberate urban fantasy. Underneath all of it, 10% of Goodreads ratings are one or two stars and StoryGraph logs a 9% did-not-finish rate. Where readers genuinely split is on the heat itself — the same frequency that makes this a five-star read for one group is precisely why another group put it down — and on the cliffhanger, which some found propulsive and others experienced as one book cut in half.

The series question everyone should ask first: book one does not resolve. There is no happily-ever-after, the central reveal lands as the final beat, and readers coming from the sequels describe it flatly as a cliffhanger. The good news is that the wait is over: House of Crimson Kisses followed on 17 July 2024 and rates higher at 4.25 across roughly 4,557 ratings — and ends on a cliffhanger of its own — while House of Crimson Curses closed the trilogy on 5 December 2024 at 4.32 across roughly 3,648 ratings, with readers confirming a full HEA. The rising ratings are the useful signal here: book one is the weakest entry in its own series and the people who push through overwhelmingly say the second and third are better. If you are cliffhanger-averse, there is no clean stopping point in this trilogy. Start it when you are prepared to read all three.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does House of Crimson Hearts end on a cliffhanger?

Yes. Book one ends on a major reveal with no happily-ever-after for Red and Octavia, and readers arriving at book two consistently describe it that way. Nothing in the cover copy warns you, so plan to have House of Crimson Kisses ready.

How spicy is House of Crimson Hearts?

A 5/5. romance.io places it in its top band, “explicit and plentiful,” the author rates it 5/5 herself, and StoryGraph’s readers file sexual content as graphic. The scenes are frequent enough that their frequency is the book’s most common criticism.

Is the Kingdom of Immortal Lovers trilogy finished?

Yes. All three books are out — Hearts in February 2024, Kisses in July 2024 and Curses in December 2024 — plus a prequel novella and a bonus scene collection. The trilogy ends with an HEA.

Is it really enemies-to-lovers?

Barely, and readers say so constantly. The leads are intimate roughly twenty pages in, which leaves almost no hostile phase; the more accurate description is second-chance romance with erased memory. If the antagonism is what you read the trope for, this will disappoint you.

Is there an audiobook?

Yes — Podium Audio released it on 6 August 2024, narrated by Allie Rose and Anais Inara Chase, running 13 hours 28 minutes. The dual narration is the least contested thing about this book, and listeners credit it with making the two-timeline structure much easier to follow.

Do I need to read Ruby Roe’s other series first?

No. Kingdom of Immortal Lovers shares a world with her Girl Games series and characters occasionally cross over, but this trilogy tells a complete story with its own couple. Starting here is fine.

If You Loved House of Crimson Hearts, Read These Next

If the trials-and-rivalry engine is what held you, Her Spell That Binds Me runs magical competition and a blood bond at the same fully explicit level, and unlike this one it resolves. If the pull between two women who are supposed to be on opposite sides is the draw, Tryst Six Venom delivers the same antagonism at the same heat in a contemporary setting, with a hostile phase that actually lasts. And for more of Roe herself, A Game of Hearts and Heists opens the Girl Games series in the same shared world with the same deadly-trials structure — we have not reviewed it yet, so browse our paranormal and fantasy sapphic romance archive in the meantime. For more in this register, work through our 25 best spicy sapphic romantasy books guide, the broader sapphic romantasy reading hub, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

House of Crimson Hearts wants to be a vampire dynasty thriller and an explicit romance at the same time, and it commits to one of those. The chemistry between Red and Octavia is real, the erased-memory reveal is a genuinely good structural idea, and the heat delivers exactly what three separate sources promise. It is also loosely edited, built on trials whose rules never cohere, and it stops rather than ends. Whether that trade works depends on what you came for: if you want a sapphic vampire romance where the wanting is the point, this is an easy recommendation, provided you buy all three books at once. Check House of Crimson Hearts on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, House of Crimson Hearts ranks as a heat-first indie sapphic vampire romantasy — magnetic and genuinely twisty, held back by craft and by an ending that isn’t one, and best approached as the opening third of a completed trilogy rather than as a book.