Loving A Vampire Is Total Chaos

Celine Brennan should be riding the high of her promotion to detective. Instead she has been handed the case that broke everyone before her: a run of murders gruesome enough that other detectives walked away rather than keep working them. Her attention keeps drifting — to a suspicious new club that has opened in the city, and to Zavier Lockwood, who has an uncanny habit of turning up wherever she happens to be.

Zavier is three hundred years old and bored with it. He has spent decades killing the scum of Chicago and tidying up the streets the police cannot, and he considers it a hobby. Then he sees Celine, and the obsession takes over from the murder. No vampire, after all, can resist the pull of his mate. As their paths keep crossing, both of them start to realise that something far more nefarious is moving through the city they each love — and that solving it means working together. Which becomes considerably more complicated once Celine works out that the man she is falling for is not only not human, but is the one committing the crimes on her desk.

Published in 2025, this is the first book in Aura Hayes's Total Chaos series, subtitled "A Paranormal Dark Rom-Com" — and the subtitle is an honest description. It swings between genuinely grisly crime-scene detail and laugh-out-loud comedy, with a slow-burn fated-mates romance holding the middle. Aura Hayes is a writing duo; the book was later picked up for a trade edition by Orion and for audio by Simon & Schuster Audio, narrated by Teddy Hamilton and Casey Holloway.