Credence

The review

After her parents die, Tiernan de Haas is sent to live with the only family she has left: her father's stepbrother Jake and his two adult sons, Kaleb and Noah, in a remote cabin in the Colorado mountains. Isolated by snow and cut off from the world she knew, Tiernan finds herself drawn to all three men. Credence is the taboo-forward, wildly explicit standalone that cemented Penelope Douglas's reputation for going where other romance writers will not.

It is a book about neglect and wanting to be seen. Tiernan grew up with famous, absent parents who barely noticed her, and the mountain household, rough and physical and paying very close attention, is the opposite of everything she knew. Douglas writes the isolation beautifully: the snow, the chores, the silence and the way a small house gets smaller.

The relationships are the point and the controversy. Jake, Kaleb and Noah are not related to her by blood, but the household is a family on paper, and the book pushes the taboo hard. Do not go in expecting a neat why-choose or a neat love triangle. Where those feelings land, and who ends up in the house with her, is the most argued-about thing in the book, and readers split right down the middle on it.

The heat: five peppers. It is one of the most explicit mainstream romances on BookTok, with an age gap, group scenes and very little left off the page. If you are sensitive to stepfamily taboo, this book is not for you, full stop.

Know before you start: it is a true standalone and ends happily, if not traditionally. The author publishes a trigger-warning list, condensed below, and it is long. Readers who love Corrupt's darkness and Priest's taboo tend to love this; readers who wanted a tidy love triangle tend to bounce. Either way, people will ask what you are reading.

Read it if taboo is your favorite flavor and you want the most talked-about version of it. Skip it if stepfamily dynamics, even non-blood ones, are a hard no.