Bree Despain is the award-winning author of the Dark Divine trilogy and the Into the Dark trilogy, and she brings her latest novel, The Killing Rules (Entangled: Mayhem Books, August 2026), to the Salt Lake Book Festival. The book follows seventeen-year-old Harper Westbrook, a cheerleader who trades her pom-poms for a lethal throwing axe once every three months — one of the Blood Bound, women cursed with a bloodlust that only killing terrible men can satisfy. When an investigative-reporter classmate starts digging into his father’s death, Harper has to stop him before her secret, and her life, unravel.

Bree rediscovered her love of storytelling when she took a semester off college to write and direct plays for at-risk teens, before going on to earn her master’s degree in Writing for Children and Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts. Her novels have been published in more than twenty countries, and The Killing Rules marks her first shape-shifting horror-romance after a career built on contemporary fantasy.

She lives in Salt Lake City with her husband, two sons, three cats, and one very good dog, and spends her downtime stand-up paddle boarding, baking French macarons, and — fittingly — researching cults. Catch her live at the Salt Lake Book Festival for a conversation on curses, cheerleading, and the rules that keep a monster hidden.