Kitty/Smuggler's Wife Books in Order

The Kitty or Smuggler’s Wife series is part seafaring adventure, part historical family drama. It follows Englishwoman Kitty Carlisle and Irish captain Rian Farrell as they crisscross the nineteenth century Pacific, from the Bay of Islands and Sydney to the Australian goldfields and the opium dens of Hong Kong.

In Kitty an 18 year old Norfolk gentlewoman finds her life upended when her father dies and a compromising encounter ruins her reputation. Banished to the New Zealand missions with a dour uncle and aunt, she lands in the Bay of Islands just before the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. On one side of the harbour missionaries try to impose Victorian order, while across the water at Kororareka the so called Hell Hole of the Pacific roars with whalers, traders and war parties. Kitty’s attraction to the aloof, gunrunning sea captain Rian Farrell forces her to decide what kind of life she wants in a place where the old rules no longer protect her.

Amber picks up several years later after Kitty and Rian have made the trading schooner Katipo their home. When a ragged Māori child offers Kitty a trinket in the Bay of Islands, she makes a split second decision that brings the girl she names Amber into their family and strains her marriage. As war breaks out in the north and the couple’s loyalties pull in different directions, the story asks what it means to love a child who does not fit easily into any one world.

In Band of Gold the action shifts to Ballarat on the Victorian goldfields. After the Yarrowee River bursts its banks and Rian is swept away, Kitty believes herself a widow. Grief, responsibility and long suppressed desire lead her into the arms of Rian’s shipmate Daniel, and the consequences play out among miners’ tents, makeshift businesses and the simmering tensions that would erupt at the Eureka Stockade. Kitty must relearn how to survive when the sea is no longer her refuge.

The Cloud Leopard’s Daughter sends the Katipo III back to sea. In 1863 Kitty and Rian sail into Dunedin Harbour to answer a plea from their friend Wong Fu, who reveals that he is a Cloud Leopard tong master and that his daughter Bao has been kidnapped to opium ravaged China. The rescue mission takes the crew from Otago’s muddy goldfields through Sydney and Manila to the alleys and teahouses of Hong Kong. Along the way the danger turns inward, as betrayal on board threatens not just Bao but Kitty’s own family.

Across the Smuggler’s Wife novels you get shipboard camaraderie, rough ports, cross cultural friendships and more than a little smuggling and gun running. Kitty herself grows from a sheltered, scandal shocked girl into a fiercely capable woman who makes her own choices, even when they are messy. Readers who enjoy historical romance with plenty of movement, danger and salt spray will feel at home here.