The Gamblers in Order (Derek Craven's Books)

Derek Craven is a former gutter child who owns the most successful gaming house in London and speaks with an accent he has never managed to lose. He is the hero of book two and a supporting character in book one, and he is the single most-cited hero in Kleypas's whole catalogue.

The Gamblers duology in order

1. Then Came You (1993) — Lily Lawson, scandalous and independent, sets out to sabotage the engagement between her sister and Alex, Lord Raiford. Introduces Derek Craven, Lily's friend and the owner of the club she frequents.
2. Dreaming of You (1994) — Sara Fielding, a novelist researching London's underworld, saves Derek Craven's life and then refuses to leave. The book people mean when they talk about Kleypas.

Two books. That is the series — anything longer that you have been handed has been merged with another Kleypas set.

Can you read Dreaming of You alone?

Yes, and most people do. Sara and Derek's story is entirely self-contained, and the novel re-establishes who he is in its opening chapters.

The argument for reading Then Came You first is that Derek spends that book being someone else's friend — competent, unreadable, plainly carrying something. Meeting him there and then getting his novel is a better experience than starting with the explanation.

Where Derek Craven appears elsewhere

He turns up in the Wallflowers books, which are set in the same London a generation on, and the world of the club overlaps with the Bow Street Runners trilogy.

None of this is a continuity you need to track. It is closer to a running acknowledgement that Kleypas has been writing one city for thirty years, and Craven is its landmark.

Why this duology still gets recommended

Because Dreaming of You does one thing better than almost anything else on the shelf: it takes a hero who is genuinely convinced he is beneath the heroine — not as a pose, as a settled fact — and makes the romance about him being wrong. The class gap is real, the accent is not softened, and the resolution is earned rather than waved through.

The prose is early-1990s and the pacing is leisurely. Readers who come to it from modern historical romance sometimes find the first fifty pages slow. Almost nobody stops.

Two books is a small commitment, which is part of why this duology keeps being recommended to people who are new to historical romance. It is a complete introduction to what Kleypas does, at a length you can finish in a week. If it works for you, the Bow Street Runners share the same London, and the Lisa Kleypas reading order covers everything else she has written.

Both books are widely stocked in paperback and audio.