The Carsington Brothers in Order

What makes the series cohere is not a mystery or a family curse but a temperament. Every Carsington brother is competent, stubborn and slightly ridiculous, and every Carsington novel is a comedy about a highly capable person being outmanoeuvred by someone equally capable. The father hovering over all of it — polite, immovable, financially decisive — is one of the great secondary characters in the genre.

The Carsington books in order

1. Miss Wonderful (2004) — Alistair Carsington, Waterloo veteran, dandy, and the family's most expensive problem, sent to the Peak District to support a canal scheme and colliding with Mirabel Oldridge, who intends to stop it.
2. Mr. Impossible (2005) — Rupert Carsington in Egypt, jailed roughly once a chapter, hired as muscle by the scholar Daphne Pembroke. A treasure hunt up the Nile and the most purely enjoyable book in the series.
3. Lord Perfect (2006) — Benedict Carsington, the flawless eldest, and Bathsheba Wingate, from the disreputable branch of a good family. Two impeccably controlled adults chasing two runaway children across England.
4. Not Quite a Lady (2007) — Darius Carsington, sent to make a ruined estate profitable, and Charlotte Hayward, who has spent a decade guarding a secret about her past. The most serious of the four.
5. Last Night's Scandal (2010) — The next generation: Olivia Wingate-Carsington and Peregrine Dalmay, children in earlier books, now grown and heading for a haunted Scottish castle. Reads best after Lord Perfect.

Publication order is reading order, and the fifth book genuinely does want the third read first.

Can you read them out of order?

The first four, yes, with almost no penalty. They are independent romances connected by a family and a father, and the brothers' interference in each other's lives is comic rather than structural.

Last Night's Scandal is the exception. Olivia and Peregrine are introduced as children in Lord Perfect, and the adult novel is built on your memory of them — the running joke of their correspondence, the shape of their friendship, the family that adopted them both. Read out of sequence it still works; read in sequence it is much better.

Which one to start with

Mr. Impossible, most of the time. It requires no setup at all, the Egyptian setting is unusual enough to be memorable, and Rupert is the purest expression of the Carsington design — a man who is not stupid but has decided that acting stupid is more efficient. If you would rather stay in England, Lord Perfect is the other common recommendation.

Miss Wonderful is the correct place to begin if you want the family properly introduced, but it is the slowest of the four and readers who start there sometimes stop there.

Where to go next

Chase's Dressmakers quartet is the natural follow-on — same wit, sharper social observation. If you have not yet read the book she is most famous for, see where Lord of Scoundrels sits in its own series, or the complete Loretta Chase reading order.