Lisa Kleypas Books in Order: The Historical Series Guide

With Kleypas, reading order genuinely pays off. The three series share a timeline: the Hathaways begin a few years after the Wallflowers end, and the Ravenels pick up a generation later, when the Wallflowers' children are grown and causing trouble of their own. Read in order and you get one of romance's great long-game rewards — watching the rake of one series show up decades later as a silver-haired father whose son is even worse than he was. Every book stands alone as a love story; the connections are the bonus.

The Wallflowers (start here)

Four young women stuck on the ballroom sidelines make a pact: help each other find husbands, by strategy if possible, by scandal if necessary.

1. Secrets of a Summer Night (2004) — Ambitious, penniless Annabelle sets her sights on a peer and gets an unsuitable industrialist instead.
2. It Happened One Autumn (2005) — Headstrong American heiress Lillian versus the starchy Earl of Westcliff. Enemies to lovers at its most delicious.
3. Devil in Winter (2006) — Shy wallflower Evie proposes to the most notorious rake in London. Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, remains the genre's most beloved reformed scoundrel.
4. Scandal in Spring (2006) — Dreamy Daisy and the businessman ordered to marry her — who has secretly wanted her for years.
5. A Wallflower Christmas (2008) — A holiday reunion novella that hands the Wallflowers' world to a rough-edged American newcomer.

There is also a prequel, Again the Magic (2004), featuring Westcliff's sister — lovely, but optional; most readers begin with Secrets of a Summer Night.

The Hathaways

A family of eccentric, unconventional siblings inherits a title nobody prepared them for. Warmer and funnier than the Wallflowers, with a gothic streak.

1. Mine Till Midnight (2007) — Amelia, holding her chaotic family together, meets a mysterious, half-Roma gambling club manager.
2. Seduce Me at Sunrise (2008) — Win and Kev Merripen's long, aching, childhood-sweethearts slow burn.
3. Tempt Me at Twilight (2009) — Poppy is compromised by a ruthless hotel owner who decided he wanted her the moment they met.
4. Married by Morning (2010) — The family's sharp-tongued companion and the brother-in-law who cannot stand her. Or so they both claim.
5. Love in the Afternoon (2010) — Beatrix answers a soldier's wartime letters under a friend's name. The most tender of the five.

The Ravenels

Set a generation after the Wallflowers, with the earlier casts' children grown — including one very familiar family of devils.

1. Cold-Hearted Rake (2015) — Devon Ravenel inherits an earldom, a crumbling estate, and his predecessor's inconvenient young widow.
2. Marrying Winterborne (2016) — A self-made Welsh department store magnate and the sheltered aristocrat he refuses to give up.
3. Devil in Spring (2017) — Sebastian and Evie's son meets his match in an inventor heroine who does not want a husband. The bridge book Wallflowers fans wait for.
4. Hello Stranger (2018) — One of Victorian England's first female doctors and a government agent who keeps turning up wounded.
5. Devil's Daughter (2019) — St. Vincent's daughter, a widowed mother, and the battle-hardened man her late husband once wronged.
6. Chasing Cassandra (2020) — A railway tycoon who buys everything he wants meets the one thing he cannot: a romantic who wants to be loved.
7. Devil in Disguise (2021) — A whisky-distilling Scot in London and the widow running her late husband's shipping firm.

One note before you fall down the backlist rabbit hole: Kleypas also writes contemporary romance. The Travis series (beginning with Sugar Daddy) is set in modern-day Texas — wonderful, but not what you want if you came for carriages and candlelight.

Where to start

The clean path: Secrets of a Summer Night, then straight through all three series in the order above. The shortcut: start with Devil in Winter — routinely voted one of the best historical romances ever — then backtrack. And if you prefer Victorian grit and self-made heroes to ballroom politics, you can begin with Cold-Hearted Rake and treat the earlier series as prequels. Kleypas makes every door a good one; some just have better views.