A Villain's Hope (Heart-Mage Trilogy, #2) by S.E. McPherson
Genres: Adult, Fantasy, Romantic Fantasy, Queer Protagonists
Representation: Bisexual MC, bisexual autistic MC with ADHD, M/M/F
PoV: Third-person, past-tense; dual PoVs
Published on: 31st March 2026
ISBN: 9798992254358
Goodreads

When mages come to collect on the deal that resurrected Elias Batesian with deadly supernatural powers, he, his mage-king Beau, and brilliant queen Penny find their kingdom caught in a centuries-old battle between ancient magic and the secret society built to defend against it. If Elias can come to terms with the man he was before Beau–and may have to become again–he’ll secure unlikely allies to keep magic from breaking the world.

Book two of the Heart-Mage Trilogy, A VILLAIN’S HOPE is a polyam, bi fantasy romance. A perfect read for lovers of found family, steamy on-page spice, royal/guard, complex and loveable characters, and bi, Autistic, and ADHD rep.

Book one of the trilogy was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Top 100 Best Indie Books of 2025 and Top 6 Best LGBTQ+ Indies of 2025.

I received this book for free from the author, in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Highlights

~turns out Heart-Mages are DANGEROUS
~who had matrilineality on their bingo card
~people doing terrible things for excellent reasons
~Elias is literally not who we thought he was
~WHY IS THE END OF THE WORLD SUDDENLY ON THE TABLE

:beware spoilers for book one, A King’s Trust!:

Despite being in the kind of pain that usually makes reading very difficult, I devoured A Villain’s Hope in a SINGLE DAY. It was unputdownable! Every bit as much fun as King’s Trust, the first book in the trilogy, and much more complex with much higher stakes!

I am FED.

In King’s Trust, we had Beau’s PoV, which felt entirely correct; in this book we pivot to Elias, and McPherson proceeds to flip all the tables. It’s not that everything we thought about Elias is untrue – not at all! But…oh wow, my friends, we didn’t even have close to the whole picture about this guy. And some of that is on us, or at least me – maybe smarter readers spotted the clues in King’s Trust and were already Deeply Concerned, but I only picked up on those hints retroactively, and did not see ANY of this coming! Even though, in hindsight, yep, McPherson was definitely laying the groundwork for all of it.

Also, as I guessed at the end of King’s Trust – we learn so much more about the magic in this setting in Villain’s Hope. This book is pretty much wholly concerned with magic in various forms, actually: Penny spends a great deal of time in danger because she doesn’t have any; everyone has to deal with the fallout of the effect magic has had on Elias; Beau (and everyone else) is learning about his powers but also his needs as a Heart-Mage – and it turns out a bunch of other mages are working to bring the gods back to the world. Which may or may not end the world, if the mages are wrong about what the gods are, and what they’re like.

There is an extremely strong case to be made that they are dangerously wrong, if you were wondering.

This means Villain’s Hope has a much higher-stakes plot than the previous book – but McPherson is too smart to neglect the personal, small-picture aspects in the process. Instead, the Epic Fantasy plot is grounded in the intimate, in the relationship between Elias, Beau, and Penny, and in the relationships the three of them build with other people in the process of Beau being a Really Excellent King. I thought the balance was perfect; the characters are the heart of this series and always will be, and making the stakes immediate and personal for them kept me on the edge of my seat. (See: devouring the whole book in ONE DAY.)

And McPherson continues to be a damn clever storyteller: deliberately raising the fear of asinine cliche tropes (like ‘I’m lying to you for your own good’) only to firmly dismiss them and have the characters act like actual grown-ups instead; presenting opposing opinions of ancient history when it’s extremely important to work out which (if any) are correct; exploring several kinds of trauma in respectful, not-gratuitous ways; creating extremely complicated situations and not flinching away from that complexity for one single moment! I loved how all of the reveals grew from seeds that were planted earlier, that even the most table-flipping twists had had all the groundwork laid for them (even if I missed the vast majority of that groundwork!) The magic system continues to be relatively simple, but the ramifications of it are explored thoroughly; as much as it placed an ENORMOUS STRESSOR on my beloved characters, as a worldbuilding-detail I really liked everything around mages being conceived and carried to term, and how that shone a light on some of Beau’s own past.

Of course, the biggest, most fantastic twist-y thing I can’t talk about at all, because MASSIVE SPOILERS, but please take my word for it when I tell you it is PHENOMENAL and I SHRIEKED and I consider the whole thing (Elias, it’s about Elias) conclusive proof that McPherson is a GENIUS.

“What would make you believe I don’t mean him harm?”

A low, humorless exhale parted her lips. “Does that often work? Asking your marks what lie they’d like to be told?”

“An unbelievable amount of the time, yes,”

This comes with so many ramifications for the relationships between the protagonists. Tip-toing around spoilers, Villain’s Hope sees Elias and Penny grow much closer, developing their own, personal connections to each other rather than being connected ‘just’ by their mutual love of Beau. I admit, I thought some of this happened a touch more quickly than I found believable, but I’m also willing to allow that the pressures they were both under, and everything they had to do to deal with those pressures, could have brought them together as fast as they did. Poor Beau, on the other hand, pretty much has an atom bomb dropped on his relationship with Elias, and it’s messy and awful and I ached so much for both of them! (To be clear, this is not Stupid Drama^TM, like miscommunication nonsense or ridiculously contrived idiocy. It’s fair and valid and it’s kind of darkly hilarious that writing from Elias’ pov means we don’t feel the full horror of it, because of the nature of The Thing, and I can’t say any more without spoilers but I remain DEEPLY IMPRESSED by it all!)

And all of that is extremely relevant to Beau’s developing identity as a Heart-Mage, discovering for himself what it means – sometimes via contrast to how other mages work, sometimes via gut-punches that McPherson IS VERY CRUEL FOR WRITING. The disdain with which Beau dismissed ‘love mages’ in the previous book becomes more and more ironic, because over the course of the book it becomes damn clear that actually, Heart-Mages have the potential to be terrifying. I’m a huge fan of stories that weaponise ‘the power of love’, and that’s part of it here, but there’s also the relationship between Heart-Mages and their god, and how that relationship differs wildly from that of other mages and their gods. But some of the terror is not for what Heart-Mages can do, but for the downsides of their powers, their weaknesses, what happens to a Heart-Mage separated from or otherwise denied love. McPherson seems to prefer not to spell things out explicitly, which I approve of, but this implicitly casts Beau’s childhood, and especially his struggles with depression and suicide, into a very different light.

Once again, I want to murder every last one of his relatives.

Let me be next to you; I traded my whole life for that privilege.

Obviously Elias, Penny and Beau remain The Best, but just as the secondary and minor characters in King’s Trust shone, so did they in this book too. The mages who might accidentally end the world, for example – McPherson did such an incredible job at making them all into three-dimensional people, giving each of them powerful, believable motives for what they’re doing. I find that so many authors flunk giving villains (even accidental-, maybe-villains) motivations that make sense and are convincing, but that wasn’t a problem here – honestly, I only disagreed with them because I had more information available to me than they did, which makes it difficult not to sympathise with them!

But, you know, they were causing Immense Suffering to my darlings, and I can’t forgive them for that.

Nor can I figure out how to talk about THAT ENDING, because SPOILERS, but YE GODS. I trust McPherson to close the trilogy with a happy ending, really I do, but I have NO IDEA how we’re going to get there. Part of me wants to laugh at how completely this series has levelled up, shifted gears, but it’s just one more way in which McPherson constantly takes me by (incredible) surprise – we started with a royal romance, but we are officially in Epic Fantasy waters by the end of Villain’s Hope. I do not disapprove at all; I’m just so freaking impressed, and obviously wild for the next book.

I couldn’t put this down, and didn’t want to. Villain’s Hope made me glitter inside, had me kicking my feet but also gasping, and shrieking through my teeth. There was a great deal of arm-flapping. I love how little I saw coming; I love how much bigger the world got, and how much higher the stakes became, and how Elias-Penny-Beau remained the heart of the story despite that. I noticed recently that I don’t usually care about what’s going to happen next, in whatever I’m reading; if the reading experience, mostly via the prose, isn’t enjoyable, I wander away from a book. Here, I was glued to the pages, dying to know how it all turned out. I had to know what happened next.

And not one page disappointed me.

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