The Fallen Angels Series in Order

The complication is that two of the seven are expanded rewrites of Putney's earlier, shorter Signet Regencies, published years apart under different titles. This is not a problem for a new reader — the Fallen Angels editions are the complete versions — but it explains why second-hand listings for this series are so confusing.

The Fallen Angels books in order

1. Thunder and Roses (1993) — Nicholas Davies, the half-Romany earl everyone calls Old Nick, and Clare Morgan, a Methodist schoolteacher who comes to bargain with him over a Welsh mining village. The book that sets the tone: social conscience, real stakes, and a hero written as a genuine outsider.
2. Petals in the Storm (1993) — Rafe Whitbourne and Maggie Ashton, spies at the Congress of Vienna, and an ended affair neither has recovered from. An expanded rewrite of Putney's earlier The Controversial Countess.
3. Dancing on the Wind (1994) — Lord Strathmore investigating his own family's secrets and an actress who is not acting. The darkest of the seven.
4. Angel Rogue (1995) — Robin Andreville, exhausted by years of espionage, and Maxie Collins, walking to London to find out how her father died. A road romance and the warmest book in the series. An expanded rewrite of The Rogue and the Runaway.
5. Shattered Rainbows (1996) — Michael Kenyon and Catherine Melbourne, thrown together on an island and then at Waterloo. Widely regarded as the strongest single novel of the seven.
6. River of Fire (1996) — Kenneth Wilding, a soldier turned painter, investigating a death in the household where he is employed. The one with a mystery structure.
7. One Perfect Rose (1997) — Stephen Kenyon, Duke of Ashburton, given a fatal diagnosis, walking away from his life and joining a troupe of travelling players. Closes the series.

One book is frequently shelved with these and is not part of the series: The Bargain, itself a rewrite of an earlier Putney novel. Good book, different shelf.

Does the order matter?

Less than in a modern family series. Each novel is a complete romance about a different man, and the connective tissue is friendship rather than plot. You can drop in almost anywhere.

Two exceptions. One Perfect Rose and Shattered Rainbows share the Kenyon brothers and there is a family history that reads better in sequence. And the accumulating sense of a generation coming home from a long war — which is what the series is really about — only builds if you read forward.

Why these books still get recommended

Because they were doing things in 1993 that the genre is often credited with discovering twenty years later: a mixed-race hero treated with complete seriousness, an industrial-poverty plot with actual economics in it, a heroine whose profession is central rather than decorative, and a terminal-illness storyline that refuses easy comfort.

The prose is of its decade — longer, more interior, less bantering than current historical romance — and some readers find the pacing slow. What they get in exchange is emotional weight that very few modern series attempt.

What to read next

Putney's later series, the Lost Lords, is the natural follow-on — same interests, tighter modern pacing, and a shared-school premise. Everything she has written is listed in the Mary Jo Putney reading order.