The Uptown Girls in Order

American historical romance is a small shelf compared with the British one, and Shupe's corner of it is the most distinctive: Fifth Avenue mansions, Tammany Hall, tenement politics, and heroines whose fortunes are enormous and entirely controlled by their fathers.

The Uptown Girls trilogy in order

1. The Rogue of Fifth Avenue (2019) — Mamie Greene, the eldest, secretly running a fund for women the law will not help, and Frank Tripp, her father's lawyer, sent to find out what she is doing. The book that sets up the family and the double life.
2. The Prince of Broadway (2019) — Florence Greene wants to open her own casino and apprentices herself to Clayton Madden, who owns the most notorious one in the city. The best premise in the trilogy and the sharpest hero.
3. The Devil of Downtown (2020) — Justine Greene, the youngest, collecting unpaid support from men who have abandoned their families, which brings her to Jack Mulligan, who runs the neighbourhood she is working in.

Three books, complete. No novellas.

Uptown Girls or Fifth Avenue Rebels first?

Uptown Girls. It came first, it is set slightly earlier, and it establishes the New York that Fifth Avenue Rebels then moves through. Neither series requires the other, but read in this order the second one feels like a city you already know.

The two are tonally distinct as well: Uptown Girls sends its heroines downtown into gambling houses and tenements, while Fifth Avenue Rebels mostly stays among the very rich and is lighter for it.

What makes Gilded Age romance different

No titles, no primogeniture, no entail — and therefore none of the plot machinery that drives British historical romance. What replaces it is newer and nastier money: fortunes made within living memory, families desperate for social validation, and daughters who are assets in a marriage market that is explicitly commercial.

Shupe also refuses to sanitise the men. Her heroes are lawyers who fix things, casino owners and neighbourhood bosses, and the books are frank about how their money is made. Readers who like their historical heroes above reproach should know that in advance.

What to read next

Fifth Avenue Rebels continues in the same city. For the transatlantic version — American money marrying British titles — see the Joanna Shupe reading order, and for the British side of the same decades, the Belles of London.

Gilded Age romance is a smaller subgenre than the Regency, so readers who like this often want more of the same setting rather than more of the same author. Shupe is the obvious next step in both directions: the Fifth Avenue Rebels stay in the same New York, and the Joanna Shupe reading order covers everything she has set there.