The Charley Davidson series by Darynda Jones is twelve books of chaos, dead people, banter so fast you'll re-read paragraphs just to catch what you missed, and a slow burn romance with a grim reaper that gets increasingly unhinged in the best possible way. Charley is a PI and part-time grim reaper in Albuquerque who can see ghosts and has a habit of getting kidnapped, beaten up, and still somehow delivering the funniest inner monologue in paranormal romance. We have opinions about this series and most of them involve yelling at the covers.
The reading order matters here more than it does in a lot of paranormal romance series. Each book drops lore that the next one builds on, and the overarching mystery about Charley's true nature and Reyes Farrow's origins takes the full twelve books to pay off. Starting anywhere other than book one (First Grave on the Right) will spoil you immediately. The good news: book one is a complete enough story that it doesn't feel like a setup-only entry, and the humor lands from page one.
We don't have the Charley Davidson books in our database yet (we know, we know, it's on the list), so we can't link you directly to each entry. What we can do is walk through what the series delivers trope by trope, flag the content that catches readers off guard, and point you toward similar reads that are in our catalog right now. If you're the kind of reader who finished Charley Davidson in a month and immediately needed something to fill the hole, this list is for you.
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Start HuntingWhat the Charley Davidson Series Actually Is
Paranormal romance with heavy UF bones. Charley narrates in first person and the voice is relentless — every chapter opens with a fake bumper sticker or coffee mug quote that doubles as foreshadowing. The romance with Reyes Farrow is the central thread across all twelve books, and it's genuinely one of the slower slow burns in the genre given how long Jones makes readers wait for anything resembling stability between them. He falls first and he falls hard, which is devastating in context once you understand what he is.
The tropes stacked into this series: humor and banter (the entire foundation), supernatural mystery (a new case per book plus an ongoing arc), FMC with powers (which expand significantly as the series progresses), slow burn, he falls first, found family, demons and angels, and power reveal (multiple, escalating, and several will floor you). The morally gray MMC tag applies hard to Reyes.
Spice Level and Content Warnings
Books 1-3 are Steamy to Spicy territory — present but not the main event. From book 4 onward, particularly as Charley and Reyes stop dancing around each other, the spice increases meaningfully. Books 8-12 are solidly Spicy. The series contains: violence (Charley is regularly in physical danger and this gets graphic at points), mentions of child abuse in Reyes's backstory (on page in some flashbacks, so brace for that starting around book 3), torture, and some horror-adjacent content in the later books as the stakes escalate toward apocalyptic territory. The tone remains comedic even during dark content, which is either the series's superpower or its main friction point depending on your preferences.
The Books, In Order
The full reading order for the main series:
- First Grave on the Right (2011)
- Second Grave on the Left (2011)
- Third Grave Dead Ahead (2012)
- Fourth Grave Beneath My Feet (2012)
- Fifth Grave Past the Light (2013)
- Sixth Grave on the Edge (2014)
- Seventh Grave and No Body (2014)
- Eighth Grave After Dark (2015)
- The Dirt on Ninth Grave (2016)
- Tenth Grave and a Demon a Day (2016)
- Eleventh Grave in Moonlight (2017)
- The Trouble with Twelfth Grave (2017)
There's also a novella, A Very Charley Davidson Christmas, and Summoned to Thirteenth Grave (2018) as a bonus epilogue book. Most readers consider book 12 the true ending and treat 13 as a gift rather than a required read.
The series front-loads its comedy and mystery-of-the-week structure. Books 1-4 are the most standalone-adjacent, each with a solved case and incremental romantic progress. Books 5-8 start stacking mythology faster. Books 9-12 are essentially one continuous story with the series's largest reveals and the highest emotional cost. If you're considering DNFing around book 4 or 5 because the mystery-of-the-week structure feels repetitive, we'd say push to 6 before deciding — that's where the mythology acceleration becomes undeniable.
If You've Already Finished Charley Davidson
The specific combination Charley Davidson delivers — funny first-person FMC, escalating supernatural mythology, slow burn with a morally gray love interest who is not human, found family that keeps expanding — is genuinely hard to replicate. Here's what we'd reach for next.
House of Earth and Blood
Bryce Quinlan is probably the closest comp in terms of energy to Charley Davidson — she's loud, she's grieving, she's surrounded by found family, and she's hunting a supernatural murderer while falling for someone who should not be falling for her. The humor is less constant than Charley's but the mystery structure and the slowly uncovered mythology are deeply similar. Crescent City also rewards readers who are already familiar with Maas's other series, but it works on its own.
Magic Bleeds
Kate Daniels is the series most often recommended to Charley Davidson readers and for good reason. Kate is a mercenary in a post-Shift Atlanta where magic and technology fluctuate, and she has a similar first-person voice: self-deprecating, relentlessly sarcastic, physically capable in ways that still get her absolutely destroyed on a regular basis. Book 4 is where Kate and Curran's slow burn finally combusts, and the supernatural mystery of the week format has been building to this payoff. The banter in this series is as good as it gets.
Ruby Fever
The Hidden Legacy series follows Catalina, a woman with rare magical abilities navigating a world where powerful families run everything. By book 6 the accumulated found family payoffs and the FMC's power reveals have been building for the whole series — the same satisfaction you get from Charley's later books when all the mythology clicks into place. Ilona Andrews writes heroines who are both competent and frequently in over their heads, which is exactly the Charley Davidson energy.
Shadowfever
Mac starts the Fever series as a bubbly Southern girl in Dublin hunting her sister's killer and ends it as something else entirely. The power reveals in this series are seismic — the kind that recontextualize everything you've read. If Charley Davidson's escalating mythology and the slow unspooling of the FMC's true nature were your thing, the Fever series is structured around the same engine. Shadowfever is the original arc's conclusion and it is one of the more emotionally brutal endings in paranormal romance. Start at book 1.
Taming Demons for Beginners
Lower spice than the rest of this list, but the demon-and-human dynamic and the banter hit very similarly to Charley's relationship with the supernatural entities in her orbit. Robin is a heroine who's thrown into a world she doesn't fully understand and has to improvise constantly while the demon she accidentally bound grows increasingly invested in her survival. The humor is lighter and the pacing faster than Charley Davidson, which makes it a good palate cleanser if you need something that won't gut you.
Sweep in Peace
Dina DeMille runs a magical inn that hosts supernatural beings from across the galaxy and casually keeps them from killing each other. The Innkeeper Chronicles is the series to reach for when you want the sharp Ilona Andrews banter and the FMC-who-is-more-powerful-than-she-lets-on setup, but you want something lower stakes and warmer. It's funnier than most of the books on this list. Dina's dry narration and her escalating found family of weird magical creatures scratches a specific Charley Davidson itch.
Acheron
The Dark-Hunter series is the paranormal romance world-building project closest in scope to Charley Davidson's mythology, and Acheron is its emotional center. He's the head of the Dark-Hunters, an ancient god with an absolutely brutal backstory that Kenyon drip-fed readers across fourteen books before delivering the full picture here. The payoff structure — long series, slowly revealed mythology, eventually learning who the central character truly is — maps directly onto what Darynda Jones built. Fair warning: Acheron's origin section in the first half is very dark.
Archangel's Consort
Elena is a vampire hunter in a world run by archangels, and her relationship with Raphael has exactly the mortal-woman-in-over-her-head-with-an-ancient-inhuman-being energy that defines Charley and Reyes. The Guild Hunter series is more serious in tone than Charley Davidson but the found family around Elena is warm, her power is expanding book by book in ways that shift the dynamic with Raphael, and the supernatural threats escalate in scope across the series. By book 3 the mythology is well enough established that the bigger reveals start landing.
Heart of Obsidian
This is the most structurally similar comp to the Charley-Reyes dynamic on this list. Kaleb Krychek is the most powerful and dangerous person in a world of psychics and shifters, and the woman he has quietly oriented his entire existence around has no memory of who he is to her. The dynamic of the inhuman, morally gray, devastatingly powerful man who falls first and falls completely for the one woman he cannot have through force — while she slowly understands what he actually is — runs directly parallel to Reyes Farrow. This book works as a standalone but rewards series readers.
His Secret Illuminations
An orc monk and a human thief stranded together in a monastery. We're including this because the humor and banter here are the closest in register to Charley Davidson's comedic voice of anything in our database — quick, character-driven, with a heroine who runs her mouth constantly and a MMC who is quietly losing his mind over her. The forbidden love angle and the grumpy-sunshine dynamic are strong, and it's the rare Scorching book where the spice feels earned by the character work. If you found yourself reading Charley Davidson for the jokes as much as the romance, this lands.
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