Tempest Island Books in Order

Tempest Island shifts Jana DeLeon’s focus from Louisiana bayous to the warm, salt edged air of a small barrier island off the Florida coast. The series is romantic suspense with a strong women’s fiction feel, following different heroines whose lives intersect on the island as they try to outrun their pasts and decide what comes next.

In Backrush, executive chef Alayna Scott watches her carefully planned life implode in a matter of days. A personal betrayal and a professional disaster send her running back to Tempest Island and to Aunt Bea, the relative who gave her a sense of home when she was younger. The island is known locally as a place where the sea changes people. Alayna hopes it will simply give her time to breathe, but she quickly lands in the middle of new opportunities, old hurts and a slow building connection with Luke Ryan, a Navy SEAL sidelined by injury who is trying to figure out his own future.

Adrift introduces Emma Turner, a woman who has spent eight years on the run. She drifts from big city to big city, staying just long enough to keep ahead of the threat that chases her. Tempest Island was supposed to be another brief stop, a few days to rest where she can disappear into the tourist crowd. Instead, the island tugs at her in a way no place has before. She takes a job at the Island Surf Shop, finds herself drawn to its widowed owner, Mark Phillips, and has to decide whether she can risk putting down roots when her secrets are still so dangerous.

In Undertow, bestselling novelist Jill Morgan returns to Tempest Island after her real identity is leaked and a stalker closes in. Writing under a pseudonym once kept her safe. Now it has painted a target on her back. The island is the one place she remembers as feeling like home, thanks to her father’s Navy posting there, and she counts on old connections to help her stay off the radar. Being back forces her to look hard at the life she built for herself and to consider whether she can have something quieter and more honest without putting the people around her in danger.

Across the series, Tempest Island itself is the constant. There are familiar beaches, a tight knit local community, vacationers who come and go and an undercurrent of both healing and risk. Each book has its own romance and mystery, but the larger arc is about women who have been pushed into survival mode learning how to live again.

If you enjoy coastal settings, emotional second chances and suspense that grows out of very personal stakes, Tempest Island is a good place to land.