Haunting Hearts Books in Order

The Haunting Hearts books gather Alice Duncan's historical paranormal romances written as Rachel Wilson. These stories are linked less by a shared cast than by a shared idea, that love can be complicated by the dead as easily as by the living. Ghosts, old promises, family mysteries, and half-buried grief all have a way of stepping into the middle of the courtship.

They are haunted, but they are not grim.

That is worth knowing up front. Duncan uses spirits to stir the plot, reveal secrets, or shove two stubborn people together, but the overall feeling is romantic and lightly adventurous rather than frightening. The supernatural element is there to deepen the emotional trouble, not to turn the books into horror. If anything, these novels ask what unfinished business, regret, and longing might look like if they were allowed to speak out loud.

The settings move around more than in Duncan's other grouped books. One story goes to England, another to Maine, another to a haunted castle in New York, another to the American West. That gives the quartet a nice variety. You get different landscapes, different social worlds, and different kinds of hauntings, while still keeping the same mix of historical romance and ghostly interference.

Each book centers on a heroine who has more resolve than ease. Penelope Potter, Susanna, Genevieve Crowfoot, Georgina Witherspoon, these women are not drifting passively through spooky events. They are trying to protect family, make sense of old stories, or build some kind of future while the past refuses to stay put. The heroes, meanwhile, tend to be men carrying secrets of their own, which keeps the romances balanced. Nobody here gets off easy.

The ghosts are busy.

Sometimes the spirit is mischievous. Sometimes sorrowful. Sometimes the haunting points back to a disappearance, a broken promise, or an old love that still has power. That flexibility helps the books feel distinct from each other. A haunted diary, a castle legend, a soul lodged in the wrong body, or a grandmother visited by the past, Duncan can take each of those setups and still keep the focus on the living people trying to make sense of them.

If you like your historical romance with a supernatural thread, but still want warmth, humor, and clear emotional stakes, Haunting Hearts is a good fit. These books can be read one by one, but together they show how comfortably Duncan could move between frontier romance, family mystery, and gentle ghost story without losing her easy, companionable style.