CA Belmond Books in Order

If you want the full Penny and Jeremy story: A Rather Lovely Inheritance → A Rather Curious Engagement → A Rather Charming Invitation → A Rather Remarkable Homecoming
If you want the core mystery and romance first: A Rather Lovely Inheritance → A Rather Curious Engagement
If you like wedding chaos and European glamour: A Rather Curious Engagement → A Rather Charming Invitation
If you want the married sleuthing phase: A Rather Charming Invitation → A Rather Remarkable Homecoming

C.A. Belmond is the name Camille Aubray used for her Penny Nichols novels, a set of light-footed mysteries that mix romance, family secrets, and the pleasures of moving around Europe with a good traveling companion. The books feel at home in London flats, French villas, Cornish villages, old trains, and seaside hotels, but they also stay close to one woman trying to make sense of work, love, and family history.

Before she published novels, Aubray spent years writing in other forms. She wrote television drama and documentary, worked on productions for ABC News, PBS, and A&E, and was also a staff writer on the daytime dramas One Life to Live and Capitol. She later taught writing at New York University, which helps explain why her fiction often feels both polished and practical, as if it knows how stories are built from the inside.

Her training came from several directions. She studied scriptwriting at the University of London with David Hare, Tom Stoppard, and Fay Weldon, and she studied fiction with her mentor Margaret Atwood. She also received an Edward F. Albee Foundation Fellowship, was a writer in residence at the Károlyi Foundation in the South of France, and was shortlisted by the Sundance Institute and the Eugene O'Neill National Playwrights Conference. She was twice a finalist for the Pushcart Press Editors' Book Award.

Then came fiction under the Belmond name.

That part of her career began with A Rather Lovely Inheritance in 2007, followed by A Rather Curious Engagement, A Rather Charming Invitation, and A Rather Remarkable Homecoming. Those books follow Penny Nichols, an American historical researcher who is pulled into an unexpected inheritance and, soon after, a string of puzzles tied to hidden family stories, art, treasure, and old European secrets. Readers who warm to them usually like the mix of banter, travel, gentle suspense, and the steady growth of Penny's partnership with Jeremy Laidley.

One of the nice things about Belmond's fiction is that the history never feels pasted on. Penny is a researcher by trade, so clues naturally come out of wills, paintings, local legends, old property disputes, and strange objects with long memories. The novels enjoy elegance, but they are not stiff. They make room for comedy, awkward social moments, eccentric relatives, and the simple fact that a mystery is often more fun when it comes with good food and a train ride.

France keeps showing up for a reason.

Later, Aubray published historical fiction under her own name, including Cooking for Picasso, The Godmothers, and The Girl from the Grand Hotel. Those books move further into twentieth century history, but they keep some of the same interests that shaped the Belmond novels: women figuring out what matters, family legacies that do not stay buried, and settings so vivid you can almost pack a suitcase for them. The South of France, in particular, has remained one of her lasting imaginative homes.

She now divides her time between Connecticut and the South of France. That feels fitting. Her work, whether published as C.A. Belmond or Camille Aubray, often lives in that same in-between space, American and European, contemporary and historical, curious and romantic.