The Fox and the Devil Review — Is It Worth Reading?

Updated on October 9, 2026

Verdict: A gothic Van Helsing mystery with gorgeous prose, a found-family detective team and a genuinely unsettling killer, undercut by a slow first half and a romance that arrives too late for many of the readers it was sold to.

Best for: Readers who want fin-de-siècle horror, forensic detective work and obsessive sapphic yearning at a distance, and who can wait most of a book for the love story to take the wheel.

Heat level: ★★☆☆☆ (1.5/5 — low and non-explicit; romance.io assigns no steam level)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.5/5 — a 3.72 Goodreads average, three trade stars, and a reader minority who wanted more romance and less procedural)

Tropes: Hunter and hunted, obsession, forbidden love, cat-and-mouse, killer love interest, found family, immortal heroine, epistolary letters, vengeance quest, slow burn.

The Fox and the Devil by Kiersten White is a standalone paranormal gothic novel from Del Rey, set across late-Victorian Europe and ending at the 1900 Paris Exposition, in which Anneke — daughter of the vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing — finds her father murdered and a woman of impossible beauty standing over the body, and spends years hunting the killer who keeps writing her letters.

It has a 3.72 average across 2,624 Goodreads ratings, starred reviews from both Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, and a 7% did-not-finish rate on StoryGraph that tells a less glowing story. The critics and a sizeable share of readers are not describing quite the same book. Both halves of that split are worth understanding before you start.

What Is The Fox and the Devil About?

The Fox and the Devil is gothic horror first, historical detective novel second, and sapphic romance third — and the order matters. It sits in the Dracula tradition White already mined in Lucy Undying, but it is built as a serial-killer investigation, so the texture is crime scenes, early forensics and a team working a case across borders. Amazon files it under Monsters & Creatures Horror before Lesbian Romance, which is the honest shelf.

Anneke is her father’s daughter in method and not in faith: she believes in evidence, and the thing she lacks is any framework for a killer who leaves no trace. Diavola, the woman over the body, is the one thing her methods cannot account for. The book is mostly Anneke in first person, broken up by Diavola’s letters, third-person chapters from other characters and interludes set at the World’s Fair. That layered structure is what gives the book its dread — and, for some readers, what keeps the two women apart for too long.

What Makes This Sapphic Gothic Horror Romance Work

The prose: Even readers who rated it three stars single out the writing. “Beautiful” recurs, and one five-star reviewer calls it otherworldly.
The found family: Anneke’s investigative team is the most consistently praised element in the blog reviews — several call it the strongest thing in the book.
Diavola: A charming, frightening antagonist whose letters do the heavy lifting of the forbidden love arc. Readers reach for Killing Eve and Hannibal to describe the dynamic.
Period forensics: The collision of new science and old superstition works. Reviewers who liked nothing else still enjoyed watching smart people work a case.
The trade verdict: Library Journal and Publishers Weekly both starred it, and Booklist pitched it at fans of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue.

Book Synopsis

Anneke Van Helsing has spent her life orbiting a brilliant, unbearable man. Her father is a physician and a scientist and, by any sensible measure, obsessed — his life’s work is the study of vampires, a subject the rest of the world treats as a symptom. Whatever Anneke thinks of his theories, she did not expect to come home one night and find him dead, with a strange and luminous woman standing over him who then vanishes as if she had never been there.

The police have nothing. Anneke has anger, a head for method and access to the newest tools in criminal investigation, so she builds her own team and goes looking. Her father turns out to be one body among many. The killings stretch across Europe and across years, and the killer is not hiding from her: letters start to arrive, stained and intimate, signed with a single name — Diavola.

The deeper Anneke goes, the less certain she becomes about anything. Her father’s sanity looks shakier in hindsight, the history of the creature she is chasing starts to look like a tragedy rather than a list of crimes, and the dreams will not stop. The question the book keeps turning over is not only whether she can catch Diavola, but what she will do if she does — and which of them has been hunting the other all along.

My Review

White can write, and I want to open there because it is the one thing nearly every reader agrees on. The sentences are rich without being purple, the dread builds properly, and the fin-de-siècle settings — crime scenes strung across Europe, then the Paris Exposition — are dressed with real historical care. This is a Bram Stoker Award winner working in her own register, and the book never feels like a Dracula knock-off. It feels like a writer taking the Van Helsing name and asking what it cost the family.

The second strength is Diavola, and specifically her letters. Putting the love interest at the far end of a correspondence is a risky choice for a romance, but it gives the obsession a voice before it gives it a body, and the readers who love this book love it for that yearning. Around Anneke, the detective team carries real warmth; the found family is what several reviewers remember best.

Where it struggles is pace and proportion, and that is not my complaint alone — it is the most repeated criticism in the low-star reviews. Readers describe a first half that drags through repetitive murder scenes and procedural loops; StoryGraph’s 7% did-not-finish rate is high for a traditionally published title with this many readers, and slowness is the reason given. Around that sit the structural complaints: time jumps that disorient, World’s Fair interludes that at least one reviewer found jarring, and an ending several readers call rushed after a long build. A recurring note on Anneke herself is that she acts more like a reckless teenager than the adult the book says she is.

The expectation to reset is the romance. The cover copy promises an immortal sapphic romance; what readers describe is a horror mystery in which the two leads are rarely in the same room, and the obsession is often asserted rather than built — one reviewer puts the real turn around the 85% mark. If you came for the love story, calibrate: it is yearning at a distance, and it pays off late. If the killer and the gore are what drew you, you are exactly the reader this was built for.

My honest note: A beautifully written gothic procedural wearing a romance’s cover copy. If you want the romance to carry the book, it will frustrate you. If you want the hunt, the prose and the dread, it delivers them handsomely.

Element	In The Fox and the Devil
Central relationship	Anneke Van Helsing & Diavola — a vampire hunter’s daughter and the immortal killer she is chasing
Core tropes	Hunter and hunted, obsession, forbidden love, cat-and-mouse, found family, epistolary letters
Setting	Late-Victorian Europe, following a trail of murders to the 1900 Paris Exposition
Heat level	1.5/5 — low and non-explicit; romance.io assigns no steam level
Series	Standalone — no sequel announced
Content notes	Graphic murder and gore, death of a parent, stalking, misogyny, and minor child abuse, homophobia and domestic abuse

How Dark and Spicy Is The Fox and the Devil?

Dark, yes; spicy, barely. romance.io indexes the book but assigns no steam level, which is itself telling — it is not being catalogued as an adult romance with on-page sex. The romance-focused database Swooon rates it 2 of 5 flames and describes the intimacy as staying on the tamer side, while several Goodreads reviewers say plainly that there is no spice at all. I land at 1.5/5: the heat lives in the letters and the longing rather than on the page.

The darkness is where the content notes belong. StoryGraph readers flag murder, death and gore as graphic, and Publishers Weekly warns that readers will need strong stomachs. Beyond the gore, the stalking and the parental death, no reviewer I found flags anything more. For the same low heat in a period mystery, The Wicked Cometh and Even Though I Knew the End sit in the same band.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you want gothic horror with real gore, you enjoy detective procedure and period forensics, you find yearning at a distance more romantic than proximity, and lush prose matters more to you than momentum.

You may want to skip it if: you need the romance at the centre from chapter one, slow first halves make you put books down, you want explicit heat, or graphic murder scenes are a hard no.

In short: a superb gothic mystery with a love story in its margins — wonderful if that is the book you want, frustrating if you were promised the reverse.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

There is no viral moment behind this book, and I could not find an organic BookTok wave in search. Reddit could not be checked from here — old.reddit.com would not load — so I cannot tell you whether there is a thread I missed. What The Fox and the Devil has instead is the machinery of a big-five launch: a Goodreads giveaway in autumn 2025, blurbs from Chloe Gong, Allison Saft and Katee Robert, starred reviews in Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, and a three-narrator Random House Audio edition. Six months on it has 2,624 Goodreads ratings. A low Kindle price may well be helping new readers find it now — check today’s price on Amazon.

The audiobook is narrated by Fiona Hardingham, Barrie Kreinik and Alex Sarrigeorgiou, runs 12 hours and 1 minute, and came out on 10 March 2026 alongside the hardcover. Listeners consistently praise the performances, and at least one three-star reviewer singles out the narration as a highlight.

Prefer audio? Listen to The Fox and the Devil on Libro.fm — the audiobook shop that supports independent bookstores.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The writing, first and most consistently — “beautiful” is the recurring word, and it comes up even in the mixed reviews. Then the yearning: readers who love the romance love it precisely because it is pursued through letters and dreams, and the Killing Eve and Hannibal comparisons keep coming up. The found-family detective team gets named constantly on blogs, Diavola is widely enjoyed as a charming monster, and readers who came for the history praise the forensic detail and the Paris Exposition. At least one longtime White reader calls it her favourite of her books.

What readers argue about and complain about: Pacing, above everything. Among the low-star Goodreads reviews I read, most cite a dragging first half or a repetitive middle, and StoryGraph’s 7% did-not-finish rate — not far off the 9% I flagged on Her Spell That Binds Me — points the same way. The romance is the second theme: roughly as many reviewers say the mutual obsession is told rather than earned, that the leads barely share scenes, or that the love story could have been cut entirely. Third, Anneke herself, whom several readers find impulsive to the point of immaturity. Beyond that come the time jumps, the World’s Fair chapters and an ending some call rushed. The interesting finding is what the trade reviews leave out: Library Journal, Publishers Weekly and Booklist praise the gore, the mystery and the sapphic angle, and none of them mentions the pacing or the thin romance that dominate the reader complaints. Publishers Weekly and the readers agree on one thing only — this book is not for the squeamish.

The standalone question worth asking first: it is a standalone, it closes its story, and no sequel is announced. That makes the real follow-up question where to go next in White’s catalogue. Lucy Undying, her other Dracula novel, is the obvious next stop. You do not need it first, and some readers who came from it found this one less compelling.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is The Fox and the Devil a standalone?

Yes. It is a single-volume novel with a complete story, and no sequel has been announced as of September 2026. It shares Dracula lore with Lucy Undying but does not require it.

How spicy is The Fox and the Devil?

Barely — 1.5/5. romance.io assigns no steam level, Swooon rates it 2 of 5 flames on the tamer side, and several readers report no spice at all. The romance runs on yearning and letters rather than on-page sex.

Is The Fox and the Devil a romance or a horror novel?

Mostly horror and mystery. Amazon files it under Monsters & Creatures Horror, and readers repeatedly say the sapphic romance arrives late and stays in the background of a serial-killer investigation.

How gory is The Fox and the Devil?

Quite. StoryGraph readers flag murder, death and gore as graphic content, and Publishers Weekly says horror and romance readers will need strong stomachs.

Is there an audiobook of The Fox and the Devil?

Yes — a three-narrator Random House Audio edition narrated by Fiona Hardingham, Barrie Kreinik and Alex Sarrigeorgiou, running 12 hours and 1 minute. Listeners consistently praise the performances.

If You Loved The Fox and the Devil, Read These Next

The nearest match is Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil, V.E. Schwab’s sapphic vampire novel, which trades the investigation for centuries of hunger but keeps a similarly low heat and the same devotion to atmosphere. If the detective work was your favourite part, Even Though I Knew the End gives you a supernatural case, a devil and a love story in far fewer pages. And for period gothic mystery with a slow-burn sapphic thread, The Wicked Cometh takes you to 1831 London.

For more in this register, browse our sapphic gothic romance reading list, our sapphic vampire romance picks, or the full Book Reviews collection.

The Bottom Line

The Fox and the Devil is a book whose craft outruns its marketing. The prose is lovely, the found-family detective team is warm, and Diavola is a genuinely memorable monster whose letters make obsession feel like longing. It is also slow to start, structurally restless, and light on the romance its cover copy leads with. Whether that trade is worth it depends on which book you came for — but the reader who wants gothic horror and a hunt, with a love story that burns quietly underneath, will find it beautifully done. Check The Fox and the Devil on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, The Fox and the Devil ranks as a well-crafted traditionally published sapphic gothic horror — gorgeously written and genuinely dark, held back by pacing and a late-arriving romance, and best approached for the hunt and the prose rather than the love story.