There is a chapter in this book that is exactly one word long. A few chapters later there is another, also one word, and the second word is not printable on a family-friendly blog. Both belong to a frog. I have been reading fantasy for most of my life and I cannot remember the last time a running gag made me laugh out loud at the structure of a novel, at the table of contents itself. That is the level this series operates on when it is cooking, and for long stretches, Adversary to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer absolutely cooks. Consider this my spoiler-free review of Adversary to the Villain, frog chapters and all.
Fair warning before we go further: this is the fourth book in the Assistant to the Villain series, and its opening pages stand on the twist that ended book three. If Assistant to the Villain, Apprentice to the Villain, and Accomplice to the Villain are still on your list, go read them in that order and meet me back here, because this is not a series you can enter through the side door.
The Frog Finally Gets a Say
What surprised me most about this installment is how thoroughly it stops being one woman’s story. Earlier books lived mostly in Evie’s head, with her rambling, pun-happy inner voice as the series’ engine. Here the camera passes from hand to hand, chapter by chapter, and the supporting cast turns out to have been quietly ready for the spotlight all along. The dragon trainer gets his moments. The terrifying HR lady gets a family history I did not see coming and a romance I was rooting for by page count alone. And the frog, the sign-holding office mascot of three whole books, becomes something so much stranger and sadder than a mascot that I now think he was the point all along.
I will not say more about him, because the way his thread unspools is the book’s finest piece of long-game storytelling, and Adversary to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer plays it patiently, cruelly, and fairly. There are clues. I missed them. When the reveal came, I flipped back forty pages to check whether the book had cheated me, and it had not. That is my single favorite kind of reading experience, and cozy fantasy almost never bothers to attempt it.
The Scene With the Mother
Somewhere past the halfway mark, there is a quiet scene between Evie and her mother that flattened me. No spell goes off. Nobody draws a blade. Two people stand in a corridor and one of them says a sentence about motherhood that I underlined, put the book down over, and walked away from for ten minutes. The series has always kept a bruised heart under its slapstick, that is its whole trick, but this is the first time the bruise felt older than the joke. Maehrer, who worked in childcare before she wrote villains, clearly knows exactly what a child owed an apology sounds like when the apology finally comes too late.
That emotional register is where the fourth book earns its keep. The comedy is still constant, a scandalous romance novel keeps surfacing in the least appropriate hands, a lord spends the book as a snail named Blossom, somebody weaponizes the phrase “play checkers” in a way I will not explain, and a young enchantress announces other people’s private feelings with the tact of a weather report. I would read an entire book about her. But the laughs are load-bearing now. They hold the roof up over some genuinely heavy rooms: three separate terrible parents, a heroine quietly wondering whether everyone she loves would be safer without her, and a kingdom that keeps calling its kindest person a monster until she starts to believe it.
Where It Falters
I wish I could tell you the whole book moves like its best fifty pages. It does not. The middle third sends the cast out on errands, a key here, a book there, a misunderstood giant in between, and while every stop is amusing, the sequence reads like a season of side quests rather than a rising tide. Later, the story pauses for a series of one-character trials that repeat the same emotional shape enough times in a row that I started predicting the rhythm. And the point-of-view generosity that gives the ensemble its life also costs the book its old intimacy: with this many narrators, nobody gets quite enough oxygen, including, occasionally, Evie herself.
No review of Adversary to the Villain would be honest without a word about the ending. I admire it and I want to file a complaint about it in the same breath. Without spoiling a syllable: nothing wraps up, the board does not just tilt but flips, and the wait for the confirmed fifth book is going to be genuinely painful. If cliffhangers ruin a series for you, hold this one until the finale exists and read them back to back. Everyone else should brace.
If You Finish This and Need Something Else
Every review needs a shelf of chasers, and my Adversary to the Villain review ends with these four:
- The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna. The book I hand to anyone who reads this series for the found-family warmth; it hugs back.
- Emily Wilde’s Compendium of Lost Tales by Heather Fawcett. For readers who like their fantasy softened by wit but stiffened by real folklore.
- Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree. Proof that low stakes can still be high craft, one espresso at a time.
- Dreadful by Caitlin Rozakis. A dark lord with no memory tours his own wicked empire as a confused stranger; the closest thing to this series told from the other side of the desk.
Maehrer’s series lives at Entangled’s Red Tower imprint, the same house behind half the romantasy shelf, and the read-alikes above are where I go between installments.
Reviewing Adversary to the Villain: Where It Leaves You
Adversary to the Villain by Hannah Nicole Maehrer is the messiest book in this series and also the one I keep thinking about. It is overstuffed, occasionally exhausting, and structurally the bravest thing Maehrer has done: a workplace comedy that hands the microphone to the whole office, hides an honest mystery under the cake crumbs, and then bets its entire cozy reputation on an ending with no safety net. Four books in, a series that started as a joke about evil middle management has become a story about who gets to write your name on the org chart of your own life.
I did not want the wait for book five. I have it anyway. So will you.
