The Trewlove Series in Order: One Mother, Five Foundlings

The premise you need before book one

Ettie Trewlove took in infants for money. The arrangement was common in Victorian London and it was usually a death sentence dressed as charity: a lump sum, a handshake, a child who quietly did not survive the winter. Ettie kept them. She fed them, named them, gave them her surname and raised them in a two-room lodging in the East End. Five of those children grow up to be the heroes and heroines of this series — a brothel-adjacent property magnate, a tavern owner, a bookshop haunter, a club proprietor and a soldier — and every one of them is defined by having been unwanted once and loved anyway.

Heath does not sentimentalise it. The siblings are angry, ambitious, and preoccupied with the aristocratic families who paid to be rid of them. Several of the books are, underneath the romance, revenge stories.

The five books, in order

1. Beyond Scandal and Desire (2018) — Mick Trewlove, who has bought his way to wealth and now intends to ruin the duke who fathered and abandoned him. His instrument is Lady Aslyn Hastings, the ward promised to his half-brother. The plan does not survive contact with her.
2. When a Duke Loves a Woman (2019) — Gillie Trewlove, who runs her own tavern and answers to nobody, finds a beaten duke in the street and takes him in. He is searching London for a runaway bride; she is the one keeping him alive. Class, and the impossibility of crossing it, treated seriously.
3. The Earl Takes a Fancy (2020) — Fancy Trewlove, the youngest, whose brothers have decided she will marry a title whether she wants one or not, and the man she keeps meeting in a bookshop. The gentlest entry, and the one most concerned with what the family's ambition costs the person it is aimed at.
4. The Duchess in His Bed (2020) — Aiden Trewlove, proprietor of an exclusive club catering to women, and a duchess who arrives as an anonymous client. The spiciest of the five and the most purely enjoyable.
5. The Return of the Duke (2021) — Finn Trewlove, raised alongside a boy whose identity was stolen, in the book that finally settles the series' longest-running injustice. A closing note that reaches back to the first page of book one.

How much does order matter?

Moderately. Each book resolves its own romance completely, so nobody will be left stranded. But two threads run the length of the series: the slow uncovering of where each sibling actually came from, and Ettie herself, who appears throughout and whose own history is doled out in pieces. Read in publication order and the last book lands as a resolution. Read it first and it is simply a good romance about a soldier.

Where this sits in Lorraine Heath's work

Heath has written a great many connected Victorian and Regency series, and the Trewloves are among her most distinctive because of the class angle — these are not impoverished gentry, they are the genuinely poor, and the books do not let the aristocracy off. Readers who want more in this register should look at her Sins for All Seasons books, which share the East End setting and something of the same anger. For her full catalogue, see the Lorraine Heath reading order.

Content notes

Baby farming, child abandonment and the workhouse are all on the page, handled without gore but without euphemism either. The heat level rises across the series, peaking with Aiden's book. Anyone who found Dickens's East End too tidy will find this a corrective.