Rina Kent Bio

Rina Kent is an English author who, in the earlier part of her career, moved frequently between France and North Africa because of her studies and her husband’s work. Since a young age she has been obsessed with storytelling and with flawed, edgy characters. The one private detail she does share about her origins is telling: at the age of five she fell hopelessly in love with a villain from an obscure indie film, sobbed when he died, and stood up for the misunderstood bad guy while her family watched, half-amused. From that moment she understood that anti-heroes, villains, and society’s outcasts were the characters who fascinated her most, and that early instinct has never left her writing.

Her debut works, including the Team Zero series that starts with Lured in 2019, marked her entry into dark romance, and she followed almost immediately with the Royal Elite series, which arrived the same year. It launched in 2019 with Cruel King and follows the turbulent lives of students at the fictional Royal Elite School, tying together power, betrayal, and obsessive love across a world where old money and social hierarchy determine nearly everything. Its first trilogy, centred on Aiden King and Elsa Steel across Deviant King, Steel Princess, and Twisted Kingdom, hooked readers with propulsive cliffhangers and combustible chemistry between its leads. The series ultimately spans seven books and an epilogue, and it is consistently praised for its interconnected stories and its morally grey characters who resist easy judgement. The Royal Elite books were self-published, and their reception confirmed that a vast and underserved readership existed for precisely the kind of psychologically intense fiction Kent wanted to write.

The move into trade publishing came with Bloom Books, the romance imprint of Sourcebooks, which has become known as a home for New York Times bestselling romance authors. Sourcebooks confirmed this publicly in an editorial announcement in April 2025, which named Kent among its roster alongside authors including Ana Huang, Lucy Score, and Elle Kennedy. Her physical editions of the Legacy of Gods series, including God of Malice, have appeared under the Bloom Books and Sourcebooks imprint, widening her reach considerably beyond the digital-first readership she had built independently. Penguin also carries her backlist titles in the UK market, with a dedicated author page that lists her Royal Elite series among its holdings.

God of Malice, published in July 2022, is the first book in the Legacy of Gods series and the novel that brought Kent to the widest mainstream attention. It is a dark romance about power, control, and hidden truth, and it centres on Glyndon King, an art student who struggles with dark intrusive fantasies, and Killian Carson, a potentially dangerous medical student from a rival university. Glyndon is drawn into the war between secret societies that operate across both campuses, and she has to decide how far she is willing to go. The book has picked up over 326,000 ratings on Goodreads, which makes it Kent’s single most widely rated title and one of the most-rated dark romance novels on the platform. The Legacy of Gods series ran from July 2022 to June 2024, published by Blackthorn Books LLC across six novels, and it built directly on the world and family dynasties set up in Royal Elite, following a second generation of the same interconnected characters into a new chapter of the Rinaverse.

All of Rina Kent’s books take place within that same interconnected fictional universe, which readers and Kent herself call the Rinaverse. Each series is designed to stand on its own and can be read independently, though readers who follow the connective tissue between them find the experience considerably richer and the callbacks far more resonant. It currently spans the Royal Elite series, the Legacy of Gods series, the Monster Trilogy (set within the Morozov mafia world), the Deception Trilogy, the Empire series, the Kingdom Duet, the Villain trilogy, the Vipers series, and several standalone works and duets. Across this catalogue Kent has written more than 40 books, and her most recent release, Tempting Venom, came out in June 2026.

Her approach to the genre is precise and deliberate. Her books are known for their psychological depth, and they frequently build enemies-to-lovers trajectories around characters whose moral greyness is never smoothed away for palatability. That quality forms a significant part of why her readership trusts her, because readers arrive knowing they will encounter the full emotional weight of what she is depicting rather than a softened version. That consistency of tone has made her a BookTok phenomenon as much as a New York Times bestselling author, and the two things are directly connected: her books generate exactly the kind of visceral, high-affect, shareable emotional reaction that drives discovery on short-form video platforms, where readers routinely post their responses to her cliffhangers and character reveals in real time.

Her stories are laced with darkness, angst, and intensity. When she is not writing, she leads a private life in London, where she travels and cares for her cats. She stays notably guarded about biographical detail beyond what she shares through her author bio, which is consistent across all her platforms. The books do the talking.

Rina Kent Books: Key Series at a Glance

Royal Elite Series (2019-2020)

Cruel King, Deviant King, Steel Princess, Twisted Kingdom, Black Knight, Vicious Prince, Ruthless Empire, Royal Elite Epilogue

Legacy of Gods Series (2022-2024)

God of Malice, God of Pain, God of Wrath, God of Fury, God of Ruin, God of Retribution

Monster Trilogy

Blood of My Monster: Lies of My Monster: Heart of My Monster

Deception Trilogy

Vow of Deception: Tempted by Deception: Consumed by Deception

Empire Series

Empire of Desire, Empire of Sin, Empire of Hate, Empire of Lust

Vipers Series (2025-2026)

Beautiful Venom: Sweet Venom: Tempting Venom

Kingdom Duet

Reign of a King: Rise of a Queen

Rina Kent recommends a specific reading order to avoid spoilers and to make the most of the overlapping characters and timelines across her series. Her official website carries a dedicated reading order page.