If you loved how Monstress immerses you in ruined empires and forbidden histories—Briar City’s relics, the Dusk Court’s secrets, the witch-nuns’ grim relic-harvesting—then City of Stairs will hit the same nerve. In Bulikov, the conquered city of dead gods, a diplomat-spy digs into erased myths and state conspiracies. Like Maika piecing together her mother’s past and the truth behind Zinn, you’ll uncover how suppressed theology and old miracles still warp politics and survival.

Maika Halfwolf does what needs doing—feeding a monster inside her, cutting through enemies like the Cumaea when cornered. The Poppy War gives you Rin, another young woman who claws her way up from nothing and forges a pact with a god whose fire burns everyone. As with Maika and Zinn, Rin’s power demands awful choices, and the cost of winning—like the carnage we see in the war’s aftermath and in the Cumaea’s laboratories—keeps ratcheting higher.

If the maneuvering between Arcanics, humans, and the witch-nuns hooked you—the backroom deals, betrayals, and uneasy alliances that put Maika, Kippa, and Master Ren in constant peril—The City of Brass delivers that same electric tension. In Daevabad’s djinn court, every dinner is a negotiation and every smile hides a blade. Like the Dusk Court’s games and the Cumaea’s machinations, centuries of grudges and magical bloodlines dictate who lives, who kneels, and who burns.

Monstress digs into conquest’s scars—Arcanics trafficked and dissected, cultures ground under the Cumaea’s boots. The Traitor Baru Cormorant echoes that intensity sans overt magic: Baru enters the empire that colonized her home and uses its ledgers and laws like knives. If Maika’s tightrope between survival and vengeance—balancing Kippa’s safety against the secrets in her mother’s mask—moved you, Baru’s cold bargains and devastating outcomes will feel chillingly familiar.

If you were drawn to Maika’s lethal competence and the spiky bonds she forms—her guarded care for Kippa, her fraught ties to Tuya—Gideon the Ninth centers on another unforgettable woman thrown into a deadly house of secrets. Gideon’s sword and Harrow’s necromancy cut through locked-room puzzles and political traps with the same grim flair you saw when Maika carves a path through witch-nuns and ancient monsters. Come for the bones and blades; stay for the razor-edged relationships.