Nightborn

Nightborn does what good second books in a fantasy series should do: it builds on established characters and raises the stakes without merely repeating the first book's structure. Grace's arc toward harder choices is a genuine development, the magic system's cost structure keeps the threat real, and bloggers uniformly reported it as a page-turner. The conventions of courtly romance-fantasy are familiar territory, but Thorne executes them with enough energy and character work to justify the read.