7 Books to Read After Kate Daniels
The Kate Daniels series works because of pace, voice, and a world that is fully realised in every corner. Ilona Andrews writes with a mordant humour that makes the horror tolerable and the romance feel earned. These 7 books match that combination.
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Harry Dresden is Chicago's only professional wizard — listed in the phone book, hired by the police, perpetually broke and perpetually in trouble.
The closest match to Kate Daniels in tone: a first-person urban fantasy narrator who is genuinely competent, genuinely funny, and routinely in over their head. Butcher's magic system is as meticulous as Andrews's Shift world.
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Mercy Thompson is a coyote shapeshifter living among werewolves. She's a VW mechanic, she can see ghosts, and she's better at surviving trouble than anyone around her is comfortable with.
The same balance of kick-ass heroine, detailed urban-fantasy world, and romance that doesn't overwhelm the plot. Briggs's Tri-Cities setting is as specific as Andrews's Atlanta.
MacKayla Lane goes to Dublin to find her sister's murderer and discovers she can see faeries — the evil kind — and that the world is on the verge of catastrophe.
The same quality of a contemporary world secretly layered over a magical one, a heroine who learns what she actually is, and a love interest who is genuinely threatening. Darker tone than Kate Daniels.
Anita Blake raises the dead, executes rogue vampires for the law, and is the most dangerous human in a city full of supernatural predators.
The urban fantasy template that Kate Daniels followed. The early Anita Blake books (Guilty Pleasures through Obsidian Butterfly) have the same sharp, funny first-person voice and the same sense of a heroine who out-thinks and out-fights everyone.
Nevada Baylor has a secret magical ability she's been hiding. When her family's debt is called in, she's hired to find a missing man — and ends up in the middle of a war between magical dynasties.
If you've finished Kate Daniels, the Hidden Legacy trilogy is the next Ilona Andrews series. Same voice, different world, equally compulsive.
Verity Price is a competitive ballroom dancer and a cryptid-rights activist — she protects the non-human creatures that share the world from the organisation that hunts them.
The same dark humour and practical competence as Kate Daniels in a different urban fantasy world. McGuire's world-building is equally meticulous.
This is a Mercy Thompson novel — the sixth in the series, focused on Mercy's honeymoon — but it demonstrates how Briggs handles the mythology and romance at their best.
Start with Moon Called if you haven't — but the Mercy Thompson series as a whole is the closest equivalent to finishing Kate Daniels and needing more.