Joanna Bourne Books in Order

If you want the main entry point: The Spymaster's Lady → My Lord and Spymaster → The Forbidden Rose
If you want the deepest backstory first: The Forbidden Rose → The Spymaster's Lady → The Black Hawk
If you want the later books with old loyalties resurfacing: Rogue Spy → Beauty Like the Night
If you want the loose gothic extra: Her Ladyship's Companion

Joanna Bourne writes historical romance with a spy novelist's love of secrets and a traveler's eye for place. Her stories move through Revolutionary and Napoleonic France and Regency England, where intelligence agents, thieves, aristocrats, and survivors all end up on the same dangerous stage. If you know her books, you know the mix: fast plot, sharp dialogue, real peril, and love stories that have to earn their happy endings.

She did not take a tidy, straight line into fiction.

Bourne studied at Goucher College and Georgetown University, then worked as a research analyst for the Congressional Research Service in Washington, D.C. After that she taught English in Africa and later joined the State Department as a Foreign Service Officer. Over the years she lived in seven countries, including England, France, Germany, Nigeria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. That is a lot of borders, languages, rooms, and ways of looking at power.

You can feel that background on the page.

She has said she always loved reading and writing romance, and she was especially drawn to the years around the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. It makes sense. Those settings let her bring together politics, danger, divided loyalties, and attraction, all in one story. Her books move through Paris streets, prison cells, safe houses, country roads, and London docks. History in her work is never still. It is always pushing on the characters.

Her first published novel, Her Ladyship's Companion, appeared in 1983. Then there was a long gap before The Spymaster's Lady arrived in 2008 and opened the world most readers now associate with her name. After that came My Lord and Spymaster, The Forbidden Rose, The Black Hawk, Rogue Spy, and Beauty Like the Night. The books connect to one another, but each centers on a different couple, a different problem, and a different piece of the larger spy network.

Readers tend to come to Bourne for capable people under pressure. In The Spymaster's Lady, a legendary French agent and a British spymaster become unwilling allies. My Lord and Spymaster drops into London's underworld with a heroine trying to save her father. The Forbidden Rose heads into Revolutionary Paris with Marguerite de Fleurignac and William Doyle. The Black Hawk stretches across years of history between Justine de Cabrillac and Adrian Hawkhurst. Rogue Spy pulls old loyalties to the surface through Thomas Paxton and Camille Leyland. Even Beauty Like the Night gives its former spy heroine, Séverine de Cabrillac, a knotty investigation to solve, not just a romance to navigate.

That balance is a big part of her appeal.

The awards followed as well. My Lord and Spymaster and The Black Hawk won RITA Awards, and Rogue Spy was chosen as one of Library Journal's best romances of 2014. But the useful thing to know is simpler: Bourne writes for readers who want brains, motion, and emotional stakes in the same book.

These days she lives in the Blue Ridge, in the Appalachians, with her family, a dog, and a cat. That feels fitting. Her fiction is full of motion, but it is written with the steadiness of someone who has seen a lot of places, listened carefully, and saved the right detail for the exact moment it will matter.