Lord of Scoundrels in Order: The Scoundrels Series

The short answer is no — you can start with book three and lose almost nothing. The longer answer is that the series is worth knowing about, because it explains why Dain arrives on the page already fully formed, and because one of the other three is very good indeed.

The Scoundrels series in order

1. The Lion's Daughter (1992) — Esme Brentmor and Varian St. George in Albania — a genuinely unusual setting for a Regency-era romance, closer to an adventure novel than a ballroom one. Varian is the connection to what follows.
2. Captives of the Night (1994) — Leila Beaumont, a painter married to a monstrous husband, and Ismal, the villain of book one, returning as something more complicated. A murder mystery with a genuinely adult marriage at its centre.
3. Lord of Scoundrels (1995) — Sebastian Ballister, Marquess of Dain, and Jessica Trent, who buys an icon, shoots him, and marries him — roughly in that order. The one everyone means.
4. The Last Hellion (1998) — Vere Mallory, Duke of Ainswood, and Lydia Grenville, a crusading journalist with a very large dog. Directly follows on from Dain's book and is the closest thing to a sequel.

Publication order is reading order. The links between them are characters, not plots.

Can you just read Lord of Scoundrels?

Yes. It is the standard entry point and it works completely cold. Nothing in Dain and Jessica's story requires you to have met Esme, Varian, Leila or Ismal, and the novel spends its opening chapters building Dain from scratch anyway — the ugly boy at school, the Italian mother nobody mentions, the reputation deliberately constructed as armour.

The only thing you miss is a slight sense of the world's continuity. Characters recur; a face from book two appears at the edge of book three. It is texture, not plot.

Read The Last Hellion straight afterwards

If you finish Lord of Scoundrels and want more of the same, the correct next book is The Last Hellion, not one of the earlier two. It picks up Vere Mallory, who appears in Dain's book, and it deliberately runs the same engine — an enormous, self-destructive aristocrat colliding with a woman entirely unimpressed by him.

It is a shade lighter and a shade sillier, and the dog helps. Most readers who love Dain come out of it satisfied.

The two earlier novels are a different proposition. The Lion's Daughter is an adventure story that happens to contain a romance, set largely in Albania and paced like a chase; Captives of the Night is a murder mystery about a marriage that has already failed. Both are good, neither is what someone who just finished Dain's book is looking for, and that mismatch is why the series is so rarely recommended as a series.

If you want more of what Lord of Scoundrels does

Chase's other major connected set is the Carsington Brothers, which is funnier and gentler, and the Dressmakers quartet, which puts three tradeswomen at the centre of the ton. For the full picture see the Loretta Chase reading order, and for readalikes there is books like Lord of Scoundrels.