Tasting Red

Tasting Red: A Spicy Red Riding Hood Retelling is the first book in Holly Roberds' Lost Girls series. Red is the granddaughter of a powerful mage — and of the neighborhood's biggest, baddest werewolf, Brexley — but she's spent years building a quiet, non-magical life for herself at a human college, far from that legacy.

A routine visit to her grandmother's house goes sideways when Red finds a heavily scarred wolf shifter in her grandmother's bedroom and discovers her grandmother has vanished. The wolf shifter was sent to eliminate her grandmother, a target of a rival power — but with Red now hunted too, he becomes the only protection she has until her grandmother resurfaces.

This is a steamy, fast-paced fairy-tale retelling that flips the "big bad wolf" trope into an assassin-turned-protector romance, leaning fully into spice over sweetness.