There exists a peculiar kind of bravery — the sort that belongs to those who see the dragon and think, quite reasonably, “No, thank you,” before circumstance shoves them forward regardless. We confess ourselves endlessly enchanted by reluctant heroes in urban fantasy, those magnificent souls who never asked to save the world and would much prefer a quiet evening at home.
We have gathered here fourteen splendid series in which the protagonist is dragged — often protesting most vigorously — into the dazzling and perilous intersection of magic and the modern world.
1. The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher
Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden is the only wizard listed in the Chicago phone book. He is also, quite possibly, the unluckiest man alive. A private investigator who consults for the Chicago Police Department on cases of the distinctly supernatural variety, Harry would dearly love a week without something trying to kill him. He never gets one. Beginning with Storm Front, this eighteen-book series (and counting) blends noir detective fiction with sprawling magical warfare, and Harry’s weary, wisecracking refusal to stop helping people — despite the catastrophic personal cost — has rightly made this a cornerstone of modern urban fantasy.
2. Rivers of London by Ben Aaronovitch
We are particularly fond of Peter Grant, a young London police constable who stumbles into the supernatural when he takes a witness statement from a ghost. Peter is not a very ambitious officer. He is not, by his own cheerful admission, a particularly remarkable one either. Yet he is conscripted into the tiny branch of the Metropolitan Police that handles magic, apprenticed to the enigmatic Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale, and set loose upon a London where rivers are goddesses and magic follows Newtonian principles. The dry wit, the loving rendering of London’s geography, and Peter’s resigned acceptance of each impossible new development make this series an absolute treasure.
3. The Alex Verus Series by Benedict Jacka
Alex Verus is a divination mage who runs a modest magic shop in Camden Town, London. His singular talent — the ability to perceive the short-term consequences of every possible action — sounds rather marvellous until one understands that it has painted a target on his back the size of Westminster. Alex spent years entangled with a dark mage and escaped with deep scars. He wants nothing more than to be left alone. The magical councils of Britain have other ideas entirely. Across twelve tightly plotted novels, Alex is pulled deeper into supernatural politics, and his journey from reluctant shopkeeper into the heart of the magical world’s power struggles is one of the genre’s finest character arcs.
4. Mercy Thompson by Patricia Briggs
Mercedes “Mercy” Thompson is a coyote shapeshifter and Volkswagen mechanic in the Tri-Cities area of Washington State. She was raised among werewolves but can never truly be one of them — a perpetual outsider with grease under her fingernails and a stubborn streak wider than the Columbia River. When supernatural trouble arrives at her garage door, Mercy would vastly prefer to hand it off to someone better equipped. Instead, she rolls up her sleeves. Patricia Briggs crafts a rich world of werewolves, vampires, and fae, but it is Mercy’s fierce practicality and refusal to play the damsel that has made this series beloved through more than a dozen novels.
5. October Daye by Seanan McGuire
October “Toby” Daye is a changeling — half-human, half-fae — working as a private investigator in San Francisco, and she would very much like the Faerie courts to leave her alone. They will not. Bound by obligation in Rosemary and Rue to solve a murder she’d rather walk away from, Toby is dragged back into the treacherous politics of Faerie after years of self-imposed exile. She is defined by persistence rather than power, by dogged refusal to quit rather than any particular brilliance. Across nineteen novels, Seanan McGuire has built a protagonist who earns every victory through sheer, bloodied stubbornness — the very finest quality a reluctant hero can possess.
6. Generation V by M.L. Brennan
Fortitude Scott is a vampire. Technically. He is still mostly human, still transitioning into whatever dreadful thing his mother’s bloodline will eventually make him, and he would very much prefer to remain the sort of person who pours coffee for a living and argues about film theory. Fort lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with a roommate who won’t pay rent and a degree that has yielded precisely zero marketable skills. When a new vampire enters his family’s territory and young women begin to disappear, Fort is forced to confront the supernatural heritage he has spent his entire adult life trying to ignore. Aided by Suzume Hollis — a sharp-tongued, magnificently dangerous kitsune — Fort stumbles through four novels of escalating peril, clinging to his humanity with both hands while the vampire nature within him grows steadily harder to deny. It is one of the most genuinely reluctant character arcs in all of urban fantasy.
7. Cassandra Palmer by Karen Chance
Cassie Palmer is a powerful clairvoyant who was raised by a figure in the supernatural underworld, escaped as a teenager, and has spent the years since wanting nothing whatsoever to do with the supernatural power structures that ruined her childhood. The universe has other plans. When circumstances thrust an extraordinary and world-shaking power upon Cassie without so much as a by-your-leave, she becomes one of the most important figures in the supernatural world — a role she never trained for, never wanted, and is spectacularly unprepared to fill. Set against a modern Las Vegas crackling with vampires, war mages, and time-bending magic, this sprawling series — now thirteen books deep — follows a heroine who spends much of her time being used as a pawn by forces vastly more powerful than she is. Cassie’s reluctance is not a character quirk; it is the engine of the entire narrative.
8. Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo
Galaxy “Alex” Stern has been haunted — quite literally — since the day she was born. A survivor of trauma and addiction, she is plucked from obscurity and given a full scholarship to Yale, not for her academic record but for her rare ability to see ghosts. Her task is to monitor the university’s secret societies as they dabble in genuine dark magic, and Alex approaches this assignment with the wariness of someone who knows that power always extracts a price. Leigh Bardugo’s prose is sharp and unflinching, and this is not a gentle story — but Alex’s fierce determination to survive a world she never chose to enter makes her one of the most compelling reluctant heroines in recent urban fantasy.
9. Kitty Norville by Carrie Vaughn
Kitty Norville was turned into a werewolf against her will. She did not volunteer for claws and moonlit transformations and the savage hierarchy of the pack. In the early novels, she is a low-ranking wolf trapped in a difficult pack dynamic, frightened and struggling, wanting nothing more than to keep her head down. Then she stumbles into hosting a late-night radio call-in show called “The Midnight Hour,” offering advice to the supernaturally afflicted, and her quiet life detonates spectacularly. Across fourteen novels set in Denver and beyond, Carrie Vaughn traces Kitty’s journey from a woman who was dragged into the supernatural world kicking and screaming into someone who gradually, painfully, finds her own voice. The reluctance at the foundation is not a pose — it is visceral, born of hardship, and it makes every hard-won victory feel earned.
10. Pax Arcana by Elliott James
John Charming is a descendant of those Charmings — the legendary line of dragon slayers and witch-finders — and he was trained from childhood by the Knights Templar, who in this world operate as a modern paramilitary organisation hunting supernatural threats. Then something happened that made John exactly the kind of being his order destroys on sight. He has spent decades in hiding — changing names, moving constantly, tending bar in quiet Virginia towns, doing everything in his power to avoid detection by both the supernatural world and the knights who would execute him without hesitation. When a vampire walks into his bar and trouble follows, John is dragged back into a fight he has been running from for years. Across five novels crackling with wit and inventive mythology, Elliott James delivers a protagonist whose reluctance is not philosophical but existential — every time John engages, he risks his life.
11. The Nightside by Simon R. Green
John Taylor is a private investigator with a gift for finding lost things, and he operates in the Nightside — a hidden, perpetually nocturnal corner of London where it is always three in the morning and anything can be bought or sold. John left the Nightside years ago, wanting nothing more to do with its dangers. A missing-persons case pulls him back. Simon R. Green writes with gleeful, pulpy abandon, and John Taylor’s reluctant returns to this impossible place — where gods drink in pubs and angels conduct business on street corners — deliver twelve novels of dark, inventive, wildly entertaining urban fantasy noir.
12. Felix Castor by Mike Carey
Felix Castor is a freelance exorcist in London who uses music — specifically, a tin whistle — to banish the dead. He is also a man weighed down by guilt over a past case gone terribly wrong, one that haunts him in ways both figurative and achingly literal. Felix would rather stop practising altogether, but a London overrun with ghosts, demons, and risen corpses keeps pulling him back to work. Mike Carey writes pure noir — morally grey, bleak, and utterly absorbing. Publishers Weekly called this series “every bit as good as the better-known Jim Butcher,” and we are inclined to agree. These five novels deserve far more attention than they receive.
13. The Twenty-Sided Sorceress by Annie Bellet
Jade Crow is a powerful sorceress who has spent twenty-five years in hiding. Her psychotic ex-boyfriend Samir — a sorcerer of terrifying power — has been hunting her across continents, and Jade knows that if he finds her, everything she has built will be destroyed. She has responded by suppressing her magic, building an entirely new identity, and opening a comic book and gaming shop in the small town of Wylde, Idaho, where she plays tabletop RPGs with friends who happen to be shapeshifters. She does not want to be a sorceress. She wants to run her shop and roll dice. When Samir’s agents finally find her, Jade’s carefully constructed mundane life shatters, and she must decide whether to run again or fight. Annie Bellet delivers ten novels of a heroine whose reluctance is rooted in genuine trauma — the bone-deep knowledge that engaging with magic has always, always cost her dearly.
14. Cal Leandros by Rob Thurman
Caliban “Cal” Leandros is half-human and half-something else entirely — something ancient, violent, and monstrous — and he has spent his entire life trying to prove he is not the creature his blood says he should be. Together with his fully human half-brother Niko, Cal works as a supernatural bodyguard and detective in New York City, where a troll lurks beneath the Brooklyn Bridge and vampires keep penthouses on the Upper East Side. Rob Thurman writes with dark, gritty humour, and Cal’s struggle against his own nature — his reluctance to accept either the monster within or the hero others need him to be — gives this series a raw emotional weight that lingers.
Why We Love the Reluctant Hero
The reluctant hero endures in urban fantasy because they mirror something true about courage. Real bravery, the sort that matters, does not arrive with trumpets and a swelling score. It arrives with a sigh, a muttered complaint, and the quiet decision to step forward anyway. Every protagonist on this list would rather be somewhere else — and that is precisely what makes them magnificent.
We hope this list sends you tumbling into a new series or three. There are few pleasures so fine as discovering a world you did not know you needed, guided by a hero who did not know they were one.
