The Bow Street Runners in Order

This is Kleypas before the Wallflowers, in a considerably grimmer London: the river, the rookeries, the trade in women, and heroes whose competence comes from having been on the wrong side of all of it.

The Bow Street Runners in order

1. Someone to Watch Over Me (1999) — Grant Morgan pulls a woman out of the Thames who cannot remember who she is, and who everyone tells him is a notorious courtesan. An amnesia plot that turns into a murder investigation.
2. Lady Sophia's Lover (2002) — Sophia Sydney takes a post in Sir Ross Cannon's household intending to ruin him, for reasons that go back years. The most controlled and the most classically romantic of the three.
3. Worth Any Price (2003) — Nick Gentry — introduced in the first two books as something close to a villain — sent to retrieve a runaway bride. The payoff book, and the reason to read the trilogy in order.

A related novella, Against the Odds, originally appeared in an anthology and follows a doctor from these books. It is a coda rather than a fourth instalment.

How it connects to the Gamblers and the Wallflowers

Kleypas's Regency-era books share a London. Characters from the Gamblers duology appear here, and Derek Craven's world — the gaming club, the people who work in it — overlaps directly with the world the Runners police.

Threads also reach forward into the Wallflowers. None of this is required reading, but Kleypas readers who go through her Regency books in publication order get a slowly assembling city rather than four unrelated series.

Read Worth Any Price last

This is the one firm rule. Nick Gentry is set up across the first two novels as a genuinely unpleasant figure — a criminal who has taken a dead man's name and made himself useful to the law. His own book only works because you have spent two novels disliking him.

Read cold, it is a decent Regency romance with a kidnapping plot. Read third, it is the reason people still recommend this trilogy twenty years on.

What to read next

The Gamblers for the same London and the most famous hero Kleypas ever wrote, or the Wallflowers for the sunnier version. Her full bibliography is in the Lisa Kleypas reading order.

If you are new to Kleypas, this is a reasonable place to start rather than a bad one. The trilogy is short, the London is the same one she uses across her Regency work, and the books are self-contained enough that you can stop after one without feeling stranded. Readers who like it almost always go on to the Gamblers next, and her full run is laid out on the Lisa Kleypas reading order.

The audiobooks are widely available too, and the trilogy suits listening well because the cast stays small and easy to track.