Emmeline Truelove Books in Order

The Emmeline Truelove books are where Juliana Gray — Beatriz Williams’s alter ego — lets her love of Edwardian adventure and odd little time-bending puzzles run wild. Think steamships, archaeological digs, ghosts who may or may not be real, and a very proper heroine learning to live with decidedly improper feelings.

Emmeline Truelove begins the series as the intensely capable private secretary to the Duke of Olympia, a towering figure in late‑Victorian politics and scholarship. She prides herself on order, duty, and discretion. She also happens to see and converse with the occasional royal ghost, an ability she treats more as a nuisance than a gift.

The novella The Duke of Olympia Meets His Match serves as a kind of prologue to the larger story. Aboard a luxurious transatlantic liner, the duke hunts an anarchist and a stolen portfolio of sensitive papers. What he finds instead — or in addition — is Penelope Schuyler, a widowed governess whose calm surface hides a keen mind and a complicated past. Their cat‑and‑mouse exchanges set the tone for the series: high stakes, dry humor, and a sense that the world is stranger than it first appears.

In A Most Extraordinary Pursuit, the duke has died and Emmeline is sent to find his enigmatic heir, Maximilian Haywood, last seen at an archaeological site on Crete. Her traveling companion is Lord Silverton, a charmingly disreputable aristocrat who delights in prodding her out of her comfort zone. As they thread their way through ransacked rooms, suspicious deaths, and shadowy government interests, Emmeline’s tidy worldview starts to crack. The book balances chases and shipboard flirtation with questions about time, destiny, and how much control any of us really have.

A Strange Scottish Shore continues Emmeline and Max’s work for Olympia’s secretive network, sending them north to the Orkney Islands to investigate a supposed selkie artifact: garments that shouldn’t exist in their current form. A sudden disappearance drags Emmeline into a more direct confrontation with the series’ time‑slip elements, forcing her to decide who and what she’s willing to believe. Lord Silverton’s fate, Max’s responsibilities, and Emmeline’s own buried desires all come to a head against a backdrop of storm‑lashed cliffs and old legends.

Across the series, Emmeline is the anchor. She starts as a woman who survives by being almost invisible, the one person in the room who always knows where the files are and how the machinery runs. Adventure, love, and a few impossible events push her toward a life that’s messier, riskier, and far more her own. The books mix romance, mystery, and a light brush of the supernatural rather than leaning fully into fantasy.

Read in order, the Truelove books reward you with deepening relationships, a growing sense of the hidden world Olympia once managed, and a heroine who learns that loyalty to herself matters just as much as loyalty to her employers and country.