Summer Reading · Series Reviews

Series Review: Bow Street Runners (Lisa Kleypas)

This is the shortest series I’ve done for this project thus far and it’s more of “this next book has characters you met in the last one” kind of series which were really popular for about ten years. Today, a lot of series have something else that connects them — I’m thinking of neighborhoods and villages like Elizabeth Hoyt’s Maiden Lane and Tessa Dare’s Spindle Cove.  While the heroes all work for Bow Street, that’s not really something that connects the books on a narrative level.

This is also the first series that did not suffer for having read them all in a row over a few days. Each one of these books stands entirely on their own with unique characters and plots. I don’t have any trouble telling Nick, Grant, and Ross apart which is definitely a step up from the Bastion Club, the Highland Brides, or the Keegan-Paxton series. I also don’t want to groan when previous characters come back — Grant plays a decent supporting role in both the next two books and I never want to set the book on fire. So there’s something for that.

Objectively, the best book in this series is probably Someone to Watch Over Me. It has the tightest plot, with characters that develop and grow, and a romance that appears to escalate nicely. However, my personal favorite remains Lady Sophia’s Lover. Though the plot seems to change halfway through the book and meanders a little bit, I connected more easily to Sophia and Ross and was more invested in their romance. Worth Any Price is probably the weakest of the books, but it’s actually a really good book that I enjoyed a lot and count among one of my favorites.

There’s not much to say about this series. I love any kind of series associated with Bow Street, and I wish that that the third book had been more about Bow Street, but that’s a personal preference and doesn’t affect Worth Any Price all that much. It’s a good series, but I probably like the Wallflowers and Hathaways more. Still, Kleypas is known as one of the masters of the genre for good reason.

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