House of Earth and Blood

House of Earth and Blood is the first Crescent City novel and the book with which Sarah J. Maas opened a second fantasy world alongside her faerie courts. Bloomsbury published it in 2020. The setting is Crescent City, a modern city of angels, fae, shifters and other species ruled uneasily by Archangels, and Bryce Quinlan works and parties there until a demon kills the people closest to her.

Two years later the murders begin again, and the man accused of the first killings is already in prison. The Archangels who govern the city put Bryce on the investigation alongside Hunt Athalar, a Fallen angel bound into their service as a trained killer. His half of the deal is simple: find whoever is killing in Crescent City and his freedom goes back on the table. Neither of them chose the arrangement and neither trusts the other at the start.

Working together means going through the parts of the city that respectable people avoid, and the case widens into Crescent City's politics, its magic and its oldest grudges. The two of them have very different reasons for wanting the killer found, and the investigation keeps running into the same obstacle: the people who could answer their questions are the ones with the most to lose if they do.

Crescent City was planned as a trilogy, and this is the longest of its three volumes. House of Sky and Breath followed in 2022 and House of Flame and Shadow in 2024, and the later books tie the city's history to the wider multiverse the author had already built. The first novel establishes Bryce, Hunt, the ruling Archangels and the murder that starts everything moving.