Painted Bay Books in Order

Painted Bay is a small fictional seaside town in Northland, New Zealand, and the whole series leans hard into what that means. This is not a postcard version of coastal life. It is a working place, built around boats, mussel farming, fishing, and the kind of long memory that comes with a tight community. Everybody knows the local history. Everybody knows who belongs to whom. That makes love complicated fast.

At the centre of the series is the Madden family and the people tangled up with them. In Off Balance, Judah Madden comes back to town after his ballet dreams come apart, only to find that home is still full of the same old hurts, and one very inconvenient attraction. On Board shifts focus to his brother Leroy, whose life gets turned inside out when fisherman Fox Carmody ends up far closer than either man planned. In Step then turns to Kane Martin, a man carrying a lot of guilt, when choreographer Abe Tyler arrives and threatens to pull him into the light.

Painted Bay is the kind of town where nobody stays a stranger for long.

What links the books is not just the setting, but the emotional shape of the series. These are romances about people who have history, family baggage, and more than a little fear. Some are trying to come home. Some are trying to forgive. Some are trying to work out whether they even deserve a future that feels good. Hogan keeps the stakes personal, but never small. A damaged dream, a difficult brother, a town full of opinions, these things carry weight here.

The tone sits in a sweet spot between warmth and ache. There is humour, banter, and tenderness, but also medical issues, disability, old wounds, and questions of identity. Found family matters a lot, though often it grows right alongside biological family, not instead of it. That gives the series a lived-in feel. These people do not get to run away from their mess forever, because the town will still be there when they get back.

If you like small-town romance with real jobs, layered family ties, and a strong sense of place, Painted Bay is easy to sink into. Start with Off Balance if you can, because the books build on each other emotionally, even when each romance has its own ending. By the time you reach In Step, the town feels less like a backdrop and more like another character in the story.