Kristen Ciccarelli’s bestselling The Crimson Moth series is officially being adapted into a TV series!
Georgia Lee, Joe Henderson, and Chad Kennedy have acquired the television rights to the fantasy series, with writer Kim Shumway attached to pen the adaptation script.
The project is currently being shopped to buyers, which means the competition is about to get very interesting.
The announcement also came with enormous news on the publishing side: Wednesday Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers, has acquired Books Three and Four of the Crimson Moth series in a major deal, with Dark Descent slated for August 2027.
Who Is Kristen Ciccarelli?
Kristen Ciccarelli’s path to becoming a number one New York Times bestselling author is the kind of story that makes you feel extremely good about stubbornness as a life strategy.
Her debut novel, The Last Namsara—a dragon fantasy about a warrior princess who has been shaped into a weapon—faced over 80 rejections before it finally found a publisher in 2017. The novel launched the Iskari series, which ran to three books and established Ciccarelli as a serious force in YA fantasy.
The Crimson Moth series, which began publication in 2024, marks her first adult-market romantasy work and has taken her career to an entirely different level. Her books have been translated into more than twelve languages and sold in territories including Brazil, the UK, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Sweden.
Ciccarelli shared the news with her readers on Instagram with the kind of candor that makes her fanbase so devoted:
“I’ve been sitting on this secret for SO LONG. As someone who has always loved writing complex, morally interesting female characters, this story feels like the perfect vehicle for TV. I can’t wait to see what this incredible team creates.”
The Crimson Moth Book One: Heartless Hunter
Heartless Hunter is an instant New York Times bestseller, Indigo’s number one Best Teen Book of 2024, and the novel that made the Crimson Moth fandom one of the most passionate communities in current romantasy.
Rune Winters is a wealthy socialite known for betraying her own grandmother, a witch, to the New Republic. In secret, she is the Crimson Moth, a vigilante who spends her nights rescuing witches from execution and smuggling them out of the country using her family’s merchant ships.
When a rescue goes wrong and she needs to throw the witch hunters off her scent, she decides to court the one man most likely to expose her: Gideon Sharpe, a notorious and unforgiving Blood Guard captain loyal to the revolution.
Gideon has his own suspicions about Rune, and when he learns the Crimson Moth has been using her merchant ships, he inserts himself into her social circles by pretending to court her back.
The Crimson Moth Book Two: Rebel Witch
Rebel Witch, published in February 2025, was an instant number one New York Times bestseller, and it opens at a full sprint from where Heartless Hunter left off.
Rune Winters is on the run. After Gideon revealed her identity and delivered her into enemy hands, she has been forced into an alliance with Cressida Roseblood, who is a dangerous witch queen, planning to reclaim the Republic and reinstate a Reign of Witches, a mission she needs Rune to help accomplish.
Gideon, meanwhile, is determined to protect the world the revolution built. In his mind, every last witch must die, especially Rune.
When circumstances force Rune and Gideon into an uneasy partnership to accomplish their separate, conflicting goals, the feelings Gideon thought were dead and buried prove considerably more stubborn than anticipated. The impossible choice the book builds toward—sacrifice the girl he loves to stop a monster, or let Rune live and watch his world burn—is the kind of moral stakes that makes a finale genuinely devastating.
The Crimson Moth Books Three and Beyond: Dark Descent
Here is where things get genuinely exciting on the publishing side. The Crimson Moth was originally conceived and published as a duology—Heartless Hunter and Rebel Witch were the full story.
Dark Descent, the forthcoming third book, was not supposed to exist.
Ciccarelli announced the expansion on her Substack with the kind of honesty that her readers responded to immediately and enthusiastically. She described returning to what she thought would be the ending and finding that the characters and the world had more story to tell than she had originally planned. The result is two additional books, with Dark Descent arriving in August 2027 and a fourth installment to follow.
Here’s the synopsis from the author herself:
To save the ones she loves, Rune will have to become everything they fear.
Rune Winters died for Cascadia and came back changed. The resurrection left something dark coiled beneath her ribs: a growing corruption she can’t explain and can’t afford to reveal. Not to the political enemies demanding evaluations for all witches, and not to Gideon, the former witch hunter she married who she fears losing most of all.
As witches vanish across the country and a foreign empire arrives with an offer of protection Cascadia is too desperate to refuse, Rune is forced into increasingly dangerous choices between the girl she wants to be and the power she was born to wield.
The Production Team That Gets Genre
The producer lineup assembled here is made up of people who have built television careers specifically in the kind of world-building, character-driven genre that the Crimson Moth series demands.
Georgia Lee is a writer and producer on The Expanse, one of the most ambitious and rigorously constructed science fiction series of the streaming era. Joe Henderson created and served as showrunner on Lucifer, a show that understood how to take a high-concept supernatural premise and keep it grounded in character and romance for six seasons. Chad Kennedy rounds out the trio.
Kim Shumway’s credits on The 100—a series that spent seven seasons building an increasingly complex world around morally grey characters making impossible choices—map directly onto what the Crimson Moth adaptation needs from a script perspective.
Rune and Gideon Are Heading to Screen!
Both Heartless Hunter and Rebel Witch are available now while Dark Descent arrives in August 2027. The television script is being shopped to buyers as you read this.
The casting conversation for Rune and Gideon is going to be one of the great romantasy fandom debates of the next year or two, and the only way to have genuinely informed opinions when those announcements arrive is to have already lived inside this world on the page first.
The Crimson Moth fandom has been having those casting conversations since 2024. It’s a good time to catch up!
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