Belladonna

Belladonna is Adalyn Grace's 2022 first installment in the Belladonna series, introducing Signa Farrow - an orphan who has never known a stable home, never held onto a family, and never been able to explain why death seems to follow her everywhere she goes. When Signa arrives at Thorn Grove, a grand and grieving estate belonging to distant relatives, she finds a household still raw from loss and quietly convinced that something is wrong beneath the surface. The matriarch of the family is ill in ways that don't quite make sense. The servants are uneasy. And Signa, with her particular relationship to the boundary between the living and the dead, begins to suspect that the death that brought her here was not the natural thing it appeared to be.

What unfolds is a Gothic fantasy mystery constructed with genuine care - the poison plot at the heart of Belladonna is not an ornamental one, and Grace gives it real shape and momentum. Thorn Grove itself is rendered with the full weight of the Gothic tradition: a crumbling, beautiful estate with hidden histories and an atmosphere that makes the setting feel complicit in everything happening within it. Grace understands that Gothic fiction lives or dies by its sense of place, and the world she builds around Signa in this first book is one of the series' most enduring achievements. The Victorian-inflected social world surrounding the estate adds a further layer - etiquette, propriety, and the constraints placed on a young woman without family name or fortune sit in sharp contrast to the supernatural forces Signa is quietly navigating.

At the centre of Belladonna is Death himself - not an abstraction, but a presence: watchful, dry-witted, and considerably more complicated than Signa is prepared for. Their dynamic begins with suspicion and friction on both sides, and Grace builds the enemies to lovers tension between them with patience and wit. This is slow-burn romance done properly - the charged exchanges accumulate, the distance between them narrows in increments, and the reader earns each moment of genuine connection. Death is written as a morally grey character in the most interesting sense: not villain, not straightforward love interest, but something that resists easy categorisation and is more compelling for it. The forbidden romance between a living girl and Death himself carries inherent stakes that Grace uses thoughtfully rather than sensationally.

Signa herself is one of Grace's most fully realised protagonists. She arrives at Thorn Grove as a protagonist with trauma - shaped by a childhood of loss and instability, guarded in ways she doesn't always recognise in herself, and sharper than the world around her tends to give her credit for. Watching her navigate the mystery, the social world of the estate, and her growing understanding of her own unusual nature gives Belladonna its emotional spine. The dark secrets she uncovers are not just plot mechanics - they illuminate character, deepen the world, and raise the stakes of everything Signa thought she understood about her situation.

Belladonna is the book that established Adalyn Grace as one of the defining voices of the romantasy boom - accumulating an extraordinary number of reader ratings and inspiring the kind of devoted readership that carries a series forward. It is a confident, atmospheric, and emotionally intelligent opening to the Belladonna series, and a natural starting point for any reader drawn to Gothic romance, death magic, and mysteries with genuine teeth.