Talk Of The Town Books in Order

Talk Of The Town, which also connects to the Glory, North Carolina books, shows what Karen Hawkins does when she shifts from ballrooms and lairds to a modern Southern small town. The scale changes, but not the instincts. She is still interested in gossip, community memory, second chances, and couples who would probably have an easier life if they would stop arguing for five minutes.

Glory knows everybody's business.

The first book, Talk of the Town, follows newly divorced Roxie Treymayne as she returns home determined to stop being the perfect Southern lady who got nothing back for the effort. Waiting for her is Nick Sheppard, the one-time town bad boy who is now the local sheriff and very much not over their history. That gives the series its emotional ground: people who once knew each other young meeting again as adults with sharper edges and more to lose.

Lois Lane Tells All stays in the same town but changes the angle. This time the focus shifts to Susan Collins, a reporter who wants a real story, and Mark Tremayne, the newspaper's numbers-minded CFO. Add a small-town paper, a trio of octogenarians playing detective, and a string of suspicious accidents, and you get a story that is more openly comic while still leaning on the same community energy.

The setting matters a lot here. Glory is the kind of place where the newspaper, the church bake-off, old friendships, and family reputation all still matter. People do not disappear into the background. They comment, meddle, and remember what happened ten years ago. For romance, that is useful pressure. It means the couples are always negotiating not just private feelings, but the stories everyone else tells about them.

So this page is best for readers who like Hawkins's sense of humor and warmth but want something contemporary. The gowns are gone, the gossip remains, and small-town life does a lot of the same work that the London season does in her historical books.