There are plenty of romance novels that claim to feature a ‘strong female lead’. Few are willing to let their women be ugly about it. They’re more focused on presenting a socially acceptable ideal of power, rather than a character with depth, forged by real, lived experience, and forced to become powerful.

Katniss Everdeen broke The Hunger Games out of Fantasy and into mainstream readership precisely because she was exactly this. A woman forged by life and forced to become something more. Not because she was beautiful, or skinny (in fact, Jennifer Lawrence refused to lose weight for the part in the movies), but because she refused to quit.

Fewer authors still allow their FMCs to have rage that is strategic. Violence that is deliberate. Morality that is unresolved.

And the number that exists in the romance sphere?

Practically non-existent.

So when I introduce you to Lana Myers and the Mindf*ck Series by S.T. Abby, I want you to understand the true rarity of the woman we are dealing with. Lana is a powerful female lead. Not politely. Not cautiously. And not with the expectation that the reader will approve.

And not with the safety net of speculative or Fantasy fiction that couches their power in powers or technology, or even politics.

Lana is a real woman, in the real world, in a series of contemporary romance novels.

Dark romance novels. I need to be clear about that right from the start. Because these books are not just dark, they’re far enough along the spectrum of dark romance that you really need to check the trigger warnings before reading. A friend was curious about my copy a few weeks ago, and asked if they were any good.

“They’re amazing!” I told her. “Do NOT read them.”

Madness? Nope. Just a clear knowledge of her reading tastes and the absolute certainty that these books are way too dark for her to stomach.

And that’s okay. In fact, it’s by design.

But if you like your novels dark and are wiling to flip the script on which gender gets to be the morally grey one, read on. Because this is the best dark romance series I’ve read to date, and Lana Myers is probably the best written example of a ‘powerful female character’ I’ve ever come across.

What the Mindfuck Series Actually Is

This is a series that hands narrative authority to a woman who has been brutalised, discarded by systems meant to protect her, and who responds not by surviving quietly, but by burning those systems to the ground with meticulous care. 

When S.T. Abby wrote these books (and let’s just pause here to appreciate the genius of her pen name spelling Stabby in a series about a serial killer who prefers knives), she wasn’t interested in redemption arcs. There are no sanded edges here. 

Instead, she was interested in what happens when female rage is allowed to be complete, and competent.

That’s why this series still lives in readers’ heads years after they finish it. Why I binged the entire thing and then immediately re-read it. 

And why Lana Myers remains one of the most powerful FMCs in dark romance, not because she is ‘empowering’, but because the books never take her power away.

If you’ve never heard of it before, the Mindfuck Series is best understood as a revenge thriller that happens to contain a romance. And while the romance is central enough that you couldn’t remove it without destroying the narrative complexity, you could remove it and still have a fully realised arc. 

Across five short, fast-paced instalments, the story follows Lana Myers, a serial killer systematically targeting men who escaped justice after committing acts of extreme sexual violence. And when I say extreme I do mean extreme. These events are recounted on page, in detail, and are very disturbing. 

Tread lightly. Read with caution. There is a great deal of catharsis in it, but they’re not an easy read.

Running parallel to the systematic annihilation of these men a blossoming romance between Lana and Logan Bennett.

And FBI profiler.

The FBI profiler assigned to catch the the person responsible for the series of killings Lana herself is orchestrating.

They’re Dual POV novels, we get to live inside the head of both Lana, as she struggles to retain herself while finally holding these men accountable for their actions, and Logan, as he hunts for a monster he doesn’t realise he’s sharing a bed with. 

The series isn’t using the thriller elements to spice up a love story; it’s using the romance to complicate a revenge narrative that is already fully operational. 

Lana’s killing spree does not exist to be softened, redeemed, or resolved by love. Logan isn’t her salvation. He’s not there to heal her through phenomenal sex (though they certainly have a lot of that). 

The romance exists because morality is not a straight line, morally grey characters don’t need to be redeemed to be right, and two people can be absolutely perfect for each other despite being fundamental opposed in their methods.

Logan’s dedicated his life to justice. Lana’s life was destroyed because the justice system failed her. Repeatedly. Catastrophically.

And so she became justice incarnate.

The Bingeable Series Format Is So Good

I’m not kidding when i said i read these straight through and immediately went back to the start. The Mindfuck Series consists of several compulsively bingeable, novella-length instalments, each of which end on a sharp cliffhanger.

You can’t not read the next one.

When you get to the end you can’t actually fathom the loss, so you want to read them again.

This series turns the ‘just one more chapter’ frenzy up a notch, because it’s ‘just one more novel’.

And they’re short enough to finish in a night.

The problem is there are five of them, so don’t expect to get any sleep. So you have them in the right order (and you don’t want to read them out of order), we have:

Book 1: The Risk

Book 2: Sidetracked 

Book 3: Scarlet Angel

Book 4: All The Lies

Book 5: Paint It All Red 

I have the omnibus containing the full series, but I can also highly recommend the audiobooks. The narrators are exquisite to listen to.

The short format isn’t accidental. It’s a structural choice that mirrors Lana’s own momentum. 

Once she starts, she does not stop.

She can’t.

And neither can you.

The Lie Of The ‘Powerful FMC’ And What Lana Does Instead

In romance discourse, a “strong female character” is often just a woman with attitude. She’s mouthy, resistant, emotionally armoured, and eventually softened into something safer once the right man gains access. Her strength is aesthetic. Temporary. Designed to be dismantled by love.

Or, worse, the only personality trait the author gave her. 

Lana Myers is written in direct opposition to that model.

Her power doesn’t live in defiance or bravado. It lives in logistics. She plans, surveils, adapts, executes, and vanishes. She is always ahead, not because the narrative shields her, but because she is written as relentlessly, unnervingly competent.

Just as importantly, the series never asks you to admire her. It asks you to reckon with her.

I know some people find this a tough read because they want her to win, and the reality of what ‘winning’ actually looks like is deeply uncomfortable to sit with. But for me, the unsettling part wasn’t that I was rooting for her despite the violence she was unleashing. 

It was that, in context, I found her violence entirely justified.

The books refuse to reassure you that she’s secretly virtuous, but they also refuse to turn her into a monster. Instead, they occupy the harder space of consequence. 

Lana is what happens when power is taken, denied, and then reclaimed without apology or permission.

Trauma As Engine, Not Aesthetic

One of the reasons this series works so well is Lana’s trauma is not tragic backstory there to prove romance can heal all wounds. 

Lana’s trauma is the plot engine, the romance is just along for the ride. And it’s firmly consigned to the sidecar.

The violence Lana experienced isn’t there to generate sympathy points, excuse her behavour, or give Logan something to save her from. 

It exists because it explains the shape of her rage. And it gives an outlet to the visceral sense of injustice anyone who’s endured an iota of similar damage has felt. 

The juxtaposition of an FBI agent falling in love with the serial killer he’s chasing, and the serial killer being, not a monster, but a woman so thoroughly robbed of her agency, voice, and identity, that she has become vengeance, is bitter sweet. 

The narrative never pretends love will fix what was done to her. Or even that it can redeem her. 

Logan does not rescue her from her past. He doesn’t replace her revenge with healing or offer some cleaner emotional alternative. 

He exists to add risk to the situation, not resolution.

Lana is not defined by her victimhood, but her trauma is also never erased or tidied away.

It informs her choices, as does Logan’s influence, yet the shape of those choices becomes an impossible trap between what she needs to do, what she believes is right, what she wants to have, and the seeming impossibility of ever reconciling any of it cleanly.

That balances the story so trauma never tips into exploitation.

The Romance Works Because It Isn’t the Solution

On paper, the romance should not work. An FBI profiler falling in love with the serial killer he is unknowingly hunting is a premise that risks collapsing into gimmick.

Instead, the romance is the pressure point of the whole series.

The cat-and-mouse dynamic between Lana and Logan is doing much of the narrative labour. Readers follow Logan’s investigations while watching Lana stay one step ahead, fully aware that discovery would mean annihilation. The tension is not ‘will he save her’, but ‘what the hell is going to happen when he realises’.

Because as competent as Lana is at killing, Logan is at catching killers.

His team are equally as good, and not blinkered by the fact they’re in love with their unsub. 

And not only is Logan not written to be a savour, he complicates the narrative in so many different ways across the series. Lana isn’t the only serial killer he’s chasing. His work is complicated, dark, demanding, and mirrors Lana’s even darker path.

They’re both exhausted, traumatised, and incredibly smart.

Put them together and you get constantly escalating stakes, delicious moments of emotional vulnerability, and a noose slowly tightening around the autonomy Lana has carved out for herself. 

Even when the relationship deepens, Lana remains the primary driver of the story. She does not relinquish authorship of her mission.

Why The Mindfuck Series Is Also Just A Bloody Good Read

For a long time, I struggled to put my finger on what makes this series work so devastatingly well. Not just why I enjoyed it, or why it stuck with me, but why it feels so complete. And eventually I realised it’s because the Mindfck* Series takes the tropes dark romance readers love the most and absolutely eviscerates them.

Enemies to lovers. Except one of them doesn’t know they’re enemies when they become lovers, so it’s lovers to enemies to lovers, with all the emotional wreckage that implies.

A revenge arc, but make the woman the avenging angel. Not because she’s magically powerful, or politically protected, or the heir to anything. Not because she’s chosen. But because she was utterly annihilated, and rage is what survived.

The salvation of love, but stripped of its usual function. Logan doesn’t save Lana. He doesn’t fix her. He doesn’t change her. Loving her breaks his own moral framework and nearly destroys him in the process. He doesn’t offer redemption. He offers recognition.

And the series refuses to pretend that recognition is easy, or clean, or enough on its own.

A ‘strong female lead’, too, is dismantled and rebuilt here. Lana doesn’t need to look a certain way, behave a certain way, or be softened into acceptability to occupy the centre of the story. Her power isn’t aspirational. It’s survivorship taken to its most extreme conclusion.

Victims, the series insists, do not have to remain victims forever. But it also refuses the lie that salvation comes from someone else. The path out of annihilation is internal, brutal, and relentless. It’s work. Real work. The kind that doesn’t make you prettier or kinder or easier to love.

And yet, despite the fact Logan doesn’t save her, falling in love with him does.

Not because love conquers all, but because it forces Lana to confront something she has been able to avoid until now: that survival alone is not the same thing as living. That rage can keep you moving, but it can’t tell you where to stop.

That is why this series works. Not because it comforts. Not because it redeems. Not because it takes everything dark romance promises and asks what happens when you follow it all the way through. Lots of dark romance does that.

This one takes every setup we’ve learned to expect and love and inverts it, which, in a genre fuelled by women spending most of their time in sub roles, on the wrong end of the power imbalance, and forced to navigate and survive other people’s rage, isn’t just feminist.

It’s phenomenal.

Let’s Deal With That Rape Scene, Shall We?

If you have not read the Mindf*ck Series yet, do not read this section. Skip it entirely.

The spoilers here are not mild. They are devastating, and they will fundamentally alter how the series unfolds for you. This section is only for readers who already know exactly what scene I’m talking about.

Now.

There is ongoing discourse about a specific sexual encounter between Lana and Logan that gets flattened online into “the angry sex scene” or, worse, misremembered entirely. Before we can talk about whether it constitutes rape, sexual violence, or something else altogether, we need to be precise about what actually happens on the page. Because sequence, belief, and motivation matter here.

At the point this scene occurs, Logan has just discovered what he believes is the truth.

He believes Lana is Kennedy Carlyle. He believes Kennedy is not acting with clarity or agency, but suffering from a psychological delusional disorder. He believes their entire relationship is therefore a lie. That anything between them could not be real. And that he has been emotionally and sexually manipulated while unable to meaningfully consent, because he was never informed of who she really was or what she was doing.

From Logan’s perspective, he is the one who has been violated.

What he does not yet know is that Lana is not Kennedy Carlyle at all. She stole that identity. She is Victoria Evans. The real victim. The woman Logan believes “Kennedy” is delusionally acting out a revenge fantasy on behalf of, or because she thinks she is her.

So when Logan has sex with Lana in that moment, he does so while furious, devastated, and believing that this is likely the last time he will ever touch her. Lana knows, from his behaviour, that he has figured it out. She is fully aware that he is acting out of rage. She understands exactly why. And she lets him do it.

Not because she lacks agency.

But because she believes his rage is justified.

She takes it because she has deceived him. Because she has withheld the truth. Because denying him that rage would, in her mind, be hypocrisy.

Yes, he handcuffs her to the bed. But the cuffs come after. Not before. This isn’t a ‘cuff her and rape her’ scene, though unfortunately that is often how some readers seem to view it.

That read completely misses the point. 

Logan cuffs her to the bed because he doesn’t know what to do with her.

She tries to explain.

He refuses to let her speak. And in doing so, he robs her of her voice entirely.

That is where the line is crossed.

And the book knows it.

This moment is not glossed over. It is not romanticised. It is not treated as a misunderstanding swept aside by love. Multiple characters explicitly condemn Logan for what he’s done. Jake, in particular, rakes him over the coals for retraumatising Lana, for silencing her, and for enacting sexual violence under the guise of righteous anger.

Logan himself realises the full weight of it only once the actual truth is revealed. Once he understands that Lana is Victoria. That she is not delusional. That her revenge is not fantasy, but coherent, targeted, and entirely justified. That she could love him. That she did.

He understands then that what he did was wrong.

Lana does not gloss over it either. She chooses to forgive him. Not because it didn’t matter. Not because it wasn’t violent. But because she understands his rage. Because she lives inside rage herself. And because, in the moral universe of this series, denying someone justified rage while claiming it for yourself is the deepest hypocrisy of all.

You don’t have to agree with that choice.

But the text does not pretend it is anything other than what it is: brutal, consequential, and morally messy.

And that, ultimately, is why this scene continues to be argued over. Not because the writing is careless. But because it refuses to collapse complexity into comfort, or offer the reader a single, clean interpretation to hide behind.

Believe it or not, despite appearances, this scene is the epitome of Lana’s power. She retains her agency throughout. She chooses to take Logan’s rage. She allows him to cuff her to the bed. She immediately frees herself and removes herself from the situation.

Not so she might escape, but so Logan is not forced to harm her (either physically or by locking her up). She’s self-aware enough to know when it comes down to it she won’t let herself be taken alive. She doesn’t want him placed in a position where his morality and duty force him to kill her.

This isn’t a rape scene. This is a full circle moment that sees the mirror in full reflective mode.

Logan is no different to Lana. 

Morality is an abstract concept when you feel so violated there is nothing left but rage. 

The beauty of the Mindfuck series is not that love conquers all, or that Logan saves Lana from herself. It’s that, ultimately, Logan recognises there is a level of justice that exists outside the justice system, and it is embodied in the woman he loves.