Nicole Rayburn Books in Order

The Nicole Rayburn Historical Mysteries follow Nicole, a contemporary historian and author who keeps stumbling into mysteries that refuse to stay confined to the archives. Her work takes her to old houses, ruined abbeys, and quiet English villages, where a research trip meant to fuel a book often becomes an investigation into real crimes committed centuries earlier.

The first case, The Hanging Tree, begins at Lockwood Hall, a Tudor manor said to be haunted by the ghost of Alys Bailey, a woman hanged for witchcraft in 1640. Nicole arrives expecting folklore and dusty records. Instead she finds serious gaps in the official story, hints that Alys’s trial was engineered, and modern attempts to obstruct her research. With help from a crime novelist and a history-obsessed vicar, she starts to unpick what truly happened on the gallows.

Later books keep that pattern but change the setting and era. In The Devil’s Den she travels to the Lake District and becomes fascinated by the disappearance of Isobel Devlin, a pregnant noblewoman who vanished from an island abbey in 1540. The Shadow Bride ties a ghost ship wrecked off Cornwall in 1782 to a house Nicole and her partner Kyle inherit in the present day. The Lost Tower turns an odd gap in a friend’s family tree into a deep dive into a Tudor ancestor whose existence someone tried to erase.

The series gradually connects Nicole’s professional curiosity with her own life. Questions about her family history and Kyle’s roots surface alongside the cold cases she pursues. By the time of The Gilded Lily and A Fall from Grace, she is investigating missing Victorians – a superintendent’s vanished daughter in London, a playwright who walked out one evening and never came home – while teaming up with other familiar characters from Shapiro’s universe, including psychic historian Quinn Allenby.

Tone-wise, these books sit between gothic suspense and traditional mystery. Nicole does not time-travel, but old scandals bleed into the present through letters, objects, legends, and the lingering consequences of what people did to protect their reputations. Some threats are very current, as those with something to lose push back against her probing.

What holds the series together is Nicole herself: curious, stubborn, and driven by a sense that misrepresented women deserve to have their stories told accurately, even if that means questioning records that have stood for centuries. Each novel can be read alone, but following them in order lets readers watch her relationships, career, and sense of self evolve alongside the cases she takes on.