Gothic sapphic romance with Lovecraftian monsters, anyone?

My author friend Golden Angel writes a lot of kinky romances and historical romances with spanking, so when she told me about this F/F gothic romance series with a tentacle monster after she met the author, L.S. Johnson, at Awesome Con, I was 100% in.

To be clear, it's not a monster romance, where the romance is with the monster, but a romance with an actual monster/mystery at the center of it.

It's set in the mid-eighteenth century, though honestly, it felt more Victorian to me, and HP Lovecraft was active in the early 20th century, and the tentacle monster is named for the Biblical monster Leviathan, so the historical references are kind of all over the place but it's nicely Gothic in atmosphere and I pretty much devoured the series like the tentacle monster devoured all the people fed to it.

Caroline Daniels is our sheltered but plucky heroine, whose father wants her to marry the aristocratic Sir Edward Masterson in the first book, but who falls for Sir Edward's cross-dressing secretary, Mr. Jonathan Chase. Mr. Chase is actually Joanna Chase, who donned trousers and the name Jonathan when her father died, to settle his estate and provide for her mother and sister.

Somehow, Jo Chase ends up working undercover for Mr. Smith, an agent of the Crown in what's meant to be the mid-eighteenth century version of MI5. He's gathering evidence of Sir Edward's crimes and warns Caroline to "ask him about his wives" before she agrees to marry him.

Caroline doesn't want to marry in the first place, though it takes some time for her to figure out the reason why (other than that Sir Edward is a truly creepy son of a bitch and yes, he did feed his prior wives to the tentacle monster).

Caroline and Jo fall in love over the course of figuring out what Sir Edward is up to and then spend the next three books of the series solving more and more of the mystery of the Leviathan and how the whole Masterson family is involved with it.

The series is nowhere near the level of steamy that I typically prefer. There's a very sweet kiss at the end of the first book and Caroline and Jo definitely get it on in subsequent books, but all the sexy bits fade to black. And I suppose only the first book and maybe part of the second are more like your traditional romances, with the will-they-won't-they fall in love story beats.

It's more of a horror/gothic mystery story with a romantic thread running through it. Caroline and Jo's relationship develops and deepens over the course of the series but focus is more about them figuring out how to work together and whether they're stay alive long enough to build a life together than about the falling in love part.

But the monstery and human monster parts of the plot line are deliciously weird and creepy and I stayed up late to finish each book. They're not very long books—maybe more novella or short novel lengths—and I really enjoyed the series.

Harkworth Hall

Leviathan

The Painter's Widow

A Shining Path

Have you read any of the Chase & Daniel books? Or any other Gothic or paranormal historical romantic mysteries?