Assistant to the Villain

What's inside (8 sections)

1. A job interview in Hickory Forest
2. Massacre Manor runs on paperwork and panic
3. Falling for the boss while calling him sir
4. Someone is selling secrets to the king
5. Guvres, galas, and a rescue promise
6. Where it drags for me
7. Key takeaways
8. FAQ

I picked up Assistant to the Villain because a friend kept sending me clips and saying, you have to read the frog one. I had no idea what that meant. I knew only that it started as TikTok skits by Hannah Nicole Maehrer, that the pitch was Once Upon a Time meets The Office, and that the first book came out in 2023 from Entangled: Red Tower Books at around 340 pages in paperback. That sounded light. I was in the mood for light.

It is light, but in a specific way. Evangelina Sage, called Evie, needs a job badly. She talks herself into and out of things in the same breath. She loves her little sister with a force that makes everything else make sense. And she ends up working for the most feared man in the kingdom of Rennedawn, a man everyone just calls the Villain. I finished it in two sittings, laughing quite a bit in the first half, slowing down in the middle, then speeding up again when the plot finally tightened.

If you want the short version before we get into it: sunshine assistant, grumpy evil boss, creepy manor that functions like a startup with a murder budget, a very slow burn with almost no spice, dual points of view, lots of banter, a traitor hunt, dragons and dog sized problems, and a cliffhanger. Book one of the Assistant to the Villain series, followed by Apprentice to the Villain. Read in order or you will be lost.

ASSISTANT WANTED: Notorious, high-ranking villain seeks loyal, levelheaded assistant for unspecified office duties, supporting staff for random mayhem and terror, and other Dark Things In General. Discretion a must. Excellent benefits.

That ad sums up the tone better than I can. The book knows exactly what joke it is telling.

A job interview in Hickory Forest

Evie is twenty something and out of options when we meet her. She worked for Otto Warsen, the local blacksmith, doing office work. He fires her in a scene that made my jaw clench. He is the kind of boss who takes credit, docks pay, and talks to women like they are furniture. Evie walks out with no reference and no plan, which is bad because her family needs money now.

Her father Griffin Sage is sick with something called the mystic illness, which has been eating through Rennedawn for years. Her mother Nura disappeared when Evie was young, after a terrible accident involving magic that killed Evie's older brother Gideon, or so Evie was told. Her younger sister Lyssa is still a kid, sharp and sweet and obsessed with stories. Evie dropped out of school to care for them. She has an ex named Rick who is exactly as useful as that sentence suggests.

So Evie is walking through Hickory Forest, upset and trying not to cry, when she nearly runs into a man hiding behind trees. He is tall, cloaked, bleeding a little, annoyed to be seen. With him is a small green frog wearing a tiny gold crown. The frog holds up little signs to communicate. Yes, signs. Like protest signs, but frog sized.

The man is hiding because the Valiant Guards are after him. Those are King Benedict's men. The king and the Villain hate each other, and Rennedawn is basically caught between them. Evie does not know yet that the annoyed man is the Villain himself. She helps him anyway, mostly by accident and partly because she cannot stop herself from helping people. He watches her talk her way past danger with sheer nervous chatter and decides she might be useful.

He offers her a job on the spot. Assistant to the Villain. She says yes because rent exists.

I love how fast Maehrer moves here. No long training montage. One chapter Evie is unemployed and crying near a bush, a few pages later she is signing papers in gold ink and being told where the severed heads go.

Massacre Manor runs on paperwork and panic

Massacre Manor is the Villain's base and Evie's new workplace, and it is my favorite part of the book. Picture a stone manor with dungeons, bloodstains that never quite wash out, severed heads hung from the ceiling as warnings, and the occasional eyeball on the floor that squishes under your shoe. Then add HR forms. Add a shared calendar. Add interns who keep dying.

Evie's job is real office work mixed with evil logistics. She sorts correspondence, manages schedules, tracks supplies for torture and terror, sits in meetings about mayhem. She learns who does what. Rebecka Erring, called Becky, runs HR with an iron grip and clearly wanted the assistant job herself. Tatianna, called Tati, is the manor healer, warm and funny and the first real friend Evie makes there. Blade Gushiken trains the dragons and lied on his resume in ways that become a running joke. Edwin the ogre cooks. Marvin guards the gate. Clare Maverine makes magical ink. Malcolm Maverine, the Villain's younger brother, runs a tavern and makes clocks. Trystan, the Villain, has siblings and family money and family wounds, which matters more later.

And then there is Kingsley. Kingsley is a frog. He used to be human, a prince, cursed years ago, and now he lives on the Villain's desk and communicates by holding up signs. Some signs are helpful. Some just say ASS in all caps when Trystan is being difficult. Kingsley was the first character I actually laughed out loud at. He judges everyone. He loves Evie almost at once. He can tell what his friend feels before his friend admits it.

The dual point of view helps a lot here. We get Evie chapters, bright and anxious and observant, and Villain chapters, gruff and tired and confused by why his chest feels warm. His name is Trystan Maverine, though Evie calls him sir for most of the book because he told her to and because the whole staff does. From his side we learn he did not start out wanting to be a monster. His mother Amara hired an enchantress to have him killed when he was young. Kingsley got in the way and took the curse instead. That guilt shaped Trystan. He built an empire of fear partly to keep people away and partly to get back at a king and a system that let it happen.

Five months pass fairly quickly in the story. Evie settles in. She brings baked goods. She learns which hallway smells like rot on Tuesdays. She stops screaming at the heads. She starts color coding murder plans. The joke lands because Maehrer commits to it. Evil is boring admin plus sudden violence, and Evie is good at admin.

Falling for the boss while calling him sir

The romance is slow. Very slow. If you need steam, this is not your book. There is pining from almost the first week, long stares, hands that almost touch, one kiss that arrives late and from his point of view, and a lot of internal monologues about how inappropriate this is.

Evie tells herself not to find evil attractive. She fails. Trystan tells himself assistants are replaceable. He fails too. He notices she smells like roses. She notices his jaw and his hands and how gentle he is with Kingsley. He gives her a carriage ride home one night and meets Lyssa, and the scene where this terrifying man is suddenly polite to a little girl charmed me completely. He introduces himself by his real name, Trystan Maverine. Lyssa adores him at once, which tells you everything about both of them.

There is a tavern scene I liked a lot. Trystan asks Evie to meet him to look into a bomb that went off, a sign someone inside is feeding information out. Her ex Rick shows up and talks down to her. Trystan steps in without making a big show of it. Later Evie is shaken about her father and about money and about how stuck she feels, and Trystan hugs her. They almost kiss. Kingsley interrupts with a sign. I groaned, then laughed, because of course he did.

What makes it work is that they talk. For a fantasy romance about a villain, there is a lot of checking in. He asks what she needs. She tells him when he is being cold. He apologizes in his own stiff way. She sets limits. It feels healthy in a setting that is deeply unhealthy, which is part of the fun. She is sunshine without being naive. He is grumpy without being cruel to her.

My complaint here is that Evie repeats herself. She has a loop in her head: he could never like me, I am plain, I am just the assistant, do not be silly. Once or twice that is relatable. By the tenth time I wanted to shake her. Trystan has his own loop: I am evil, caring gets people hurt, stay away. Their chapters sometimes restate what we just learned in the other point of view. The pining is cute, but the middle could have cut thirty pages of staring and kept the same effect.

Still, when the kiss finally happens, it lands. It is brief. It changes how they act around each other without fixing anything. That felt honest.

Someone is selling secrets to the king

The plot underneath the jokes is a mole hunt. Someone in Massacre Manor is leaking to King Benedict. Shipments go wrong. Plans get ambushed. A bomb goes off. The Valiant Guards seem to know too much. Trystan grows colder and more paranoid, which makes Evie's job harder. Becky snaps at her. Blade acts shifty. Even Tati seems tired.

Evie decides to investigate, which is both brave and reckless. She is not trained for this. She follows paper trails. She asks questions she should not ask. At one point she finds evidence that points at Blade, the dragon trainer. I will not spoil whether that evidence holds, but the suspicion hurts her because Blade has become a friend. He jokes with her. He loves his dragons. He has that liar past that makes him look guilty even when he is trying to be good.

Meanwhile King Benedict is not a distant threat. He shows up in the story through his knights and orders. He wants the Villain ruined and wants Evie used as a pawn. There is a thread about presenting Evie as a victim to turn the kingdom against Trystan. There is also older history about Trystan's family name, the Maverines, and how much of Rennedawn's hatred is earned and how much was planted.

Evie and Trystan fight about methods. He wants to make examples. She wants to protect staff. She quits at one point after a confrontation that felt earned to me. She is storming off with good reason. She is exhausted and scared and angry that he will not trust her. Work stops making sense without her, which is the point. Trystan has to admit, mostly to Kingsley and to himself, that she is not replaceable. He goes to get her back.

I liked this stretch more than the romance middle because Evie gets to be competent. She is not swinging a sword. She is reading schedules, noticing who signed what, remembering who was in the room. Office skills as detective skills. It fits the premise.

If I am being fair, the mystery is simple. Experienced readers will guess the shape of the betrayal early. Maehrer hides one layer well, especially around Otto Warsen and what he wants, but the broad strokes are clear. The book cares more about how the leak makes everyone feel than about a clever puzzle. That is fine for cozy fantasy, but go in knowing it is not a thriller.

Guvres, galas, and a rescue promise

The last third moves fast. Trystan's father hosts an event, a gala style gathering that forces everyone into fancy clothes and polite lies. Evie has to play assistant in public while watching for enemies. Otto Warsen resurfaces here in a way that ties Evie's old life to her new one. He harmed her before, and he is tangled in the plot against the Villain now.

Then come the guvres. If you have not met Maehrer's guvres, think small dragons with big attitudes, territorial and toothy, the kind of creature that should not be loose at a party. Evie ends up fighting them to protect Trystan's identity when his father is mistaken for the Villain and grabbed. She gets hurt. She keeps going. It is the first time the book lets her be physically brave at scale, brave with a blade in hand rather than only brave at a desk, and it works because we have spent 200 pages learning she will stand in front of people she loves.

Trystan's anonymity matters to him. If Rennedawn learns Trystan Maverine is the Villain, his family burns with him. Evie understands that and acts to preserve it even while bleeding. That choice, more than any kiss, is the love confession of the book.

It ends on a cliffhanger. Trystan is taken. Evie vows to free him. There is talk of prophecy, of old storybooks about Rennedawn, of magic fading and bargains in gold ink that tie them together in ways neither fully understands yet. Book two picks up right in that mess. I closed the book feeling satisfied but annoyed, the way you feel at the end of a season finale that cuts to black mid sentence. If cliffhangers bother you, wait until you have book two on hand.

A quick note on content. Language is mild to moderate, with some swearing and dirty jokes. Violence is frequent but played for laughs, with torture and beheadings mentioned more than shown in detail. Romance stays clean in this volume, with tension and kissing only. There is drinking. The vibe is adult characters in a fairy tale office, not grim horror.

Where it drags for me

I had a good time, but I did not love everything.

The middle sags. Between the forest meeting and the mole hunt heating up, there is a long run of office days that blur together. A few scenes feel like TikTok sketches stitched into chapters, funny on their own but slow in sequence. Becky versus Evie goes around in circles before it softens. Blade's resume gag gets repeated until I started skimming.

Evie's self talk wore on me, as I said. I get imposter syndrome. I have it. Reading it for pages, phrased the same way, stopped feeling like character and started feeling like filler. Trystan's chapters have the opposite issue. He notices Evie being kind, feels confused, glares at Kingsley, gets told off by sign. Repeat. I wanted one of his chapters to surprise me.

The worldbuilding is thin in places. Rennedawn has a king, guards, manors, magic illness, dragons, curses, prophecies, but the rules stay vague. How does gold ink magic work. What are the limits on healing. Why does the mystic illness pick who it picks. Book one does not answer much, saving it for later books. That is a valid series choice, but it means some twists run on vibes rather than setup.

And the tone split may not suit everyone. People are murdered and tortured off page while Evie worries about frosting. If you want your villains truly dark, Trystan will feel soft. He is morally gray in the way romance means it, brooding and scarred and secretly tender, not in the way horror means it. I was fine with that because the book never pretends otherwise, but a friend who loves grim books bounced off hard.

Why I still recommend it: the voice. Maehrer writes banter well. Kingsley alone is worth the price. The found family at the manor, Tati bringing soup, Edwin feeding everyone, Lyssa drawing pictures for murderers, Blade arguing with dragons, Becky slowly thawing, feels warm without turning saccharine. Evie and Trystan communicate, which should not feel rare in romance but does. And Otto Warsen as a villain of the ordinary kind, the boss who steals wages and smiles, grounds the fairy tale. Real evil and fantasy evil sit side by side, and Evie stands up to both.

Who should pick it up. Readers who like cozy fantasy, workplace romances, grumpy sunshine, slow burn without spice, dual POV, and humor with heart. Readers who want intricate magic systems or high heat should look elsewhere. If you try the first fifty pages and do not smile at Kingsley's signs, stop. The book will not change for you.

I went in for the frog memes and stayed for Evie yelling at a dark lord about filing. That sounds silly. It is silly. Sometimes silly is exactly right.

FAQ

Who is the Villain in Assistant to the Villain?

The Villain is Trystan Maverine, the feared outlaw of Rennedawn who runs his operation from Massacre Manor. Evie learns his real name after she starts working for him.

Is Assistant to the Villain spicy?

No. Book one is a clean slow burn with pining, near kisses, and jokes about attraction, but no explicit scenes. Later books stay mild, with closed door or brief moments.

Is this the first book in a series?

Yes. It is book one of the Assistant to the Villain series, followed by Apprentice to the Villain. The story ends on a cliffhanger, so read them in order.