Leslie L. Stevens

Books

Books

Fiction.

01 Literary domestic suspense

The Clara Precedent Series

A quiet woman kills the respected man everyone trusted. What follows is not just a trial, but a reckoning over what counts as violence, what counts as evidence, and how many women have been living inside the same pattern.

Cover of This Is a Love Story by Leslie L. Stevens.
Book One

This Is a Love Story

A novel by Leslie L. Stevens

Clara is married to the kind of man everyone trusts. Thomas has never hit her. He has never needed to. In a small West Texas town that mistakes control for love and silence for peace, Clara begins to understand that danger does not have to leave a mark to be real.

Available now

Content note This novel depicts coercive control, surveillance, emotional abuse, and intimate partner violence. The final chapter contains an act of physical violence.

  • Book Two The Trial

    Coming October 2026

02 Dark folklore / Psychological thriller

The Grimm Books

One book contains the stories. The other follows what happens when readers begin to recognize their own lives inside them.

Cover of According to Grimm, Volume One: The Devoted, by Leslie L. Stevens.
Volume One · The Devoted

According to Grimm

Twelve tales. Thirteen readers.

Professor Vera Laine is asked to investigate a series of deaths linked to The Devoted, an anonymous online community where members share dark fairy tales and begin recognizing their own lives inside them. The stories seem to offer language for what has been survived in silence. But TheWatcher knows exactly which tale each person needs—and recognition is only the beginning.

Content note This novel contains depictions of disordered eating, self-harm, suicide, psychological manipulation, emotional abuse, and death.

Cover of Page Grimm by Leslie L. Stevens.
Standalone companion

Page Grimm

Modern Grim Folklore of Hunger, Vows, and Silence

Twelve tales where happily ever after ends on the first page. Girls swallow moonlight. Brides are given to rivers, flames, kingdoms, and men. Wolves wait at the edge of every vow. Across twelve original fairy tales, hunger becomes inheritance, silence becomes devotion, and obedience is handed down as tradition. Read alone, Page Grimm is a dark folklore collection. Read beside According to Grimm, its stories become mirrors, warnings, and evidence.

Content note This collection contains themes of coercion, disordered eating, emotional abuse, bodily harm, and death.

Volume Two

In development

Volume Three

Planned

03 Desert gothic paranormal romance

Gods Don’t Die in the Desert Series

In the desert town of San Vara, the light is famous — artists say it changes the way they see color. What they don’t know is why. Something ancient lies beneath the desert floor, and it never left. Gods don’t die out here. They hide.

Cover of What October Woke by Leslie L. Stevens.
Book One

What October Woke

A novel by Leslie L. Stevens

Camila García comes home to San Vara to get her life back together — and starts painting things she doesn’t remember making. A canvas appears on her easel overnight, dry by morning, showing lights on the desert road that look almost like faces. In town, a sculptor named Lucian Navarro looks at her like he’s been waiting. What she doesn’t know yet: something ancient beneath the desert has been dormant for a century, and her return just woke it up.

Available now