The Best Men Books in Order

The Best Men is a shorter series, just two books, but it carries a lot of emotional weight. These stories move away from the bigger football-world ensemble feel and settle into something more intimate, built around grief, found family, and the question of what happens when love shows up in the middle of a life that is already bruised.

The first book, The Best Laid Plans, follows a retired football player dealing with loss and an inherited old house in northern Michigan. The house is not just scenery. It becomes a kind of emotional worksite, a place where restoration on paper starts to mirror restoration in people. The romance with Charlotte gives the story banter and chemistry, but the real engine is the push and pull between holding on, letting go, and deciding what still matters.

The second book, The Best of All, shifts the setup but keeps the emotional thread. Liam and Zoe are bound together by the death of mutual friends and the sudden responsibility of caring for a toddler. That means the series keeps one foot planted in grief while still making room for warmth, humor, and the very practical chaos of building a home out of circumstances nobody would have chosen.

This is where Sorensen leans hard into found family.

That phrase gets used a lot, but it fits here. These books are full of people stepping into roles they never expected, guardian, caretaker, partner, safe place, and trying to do it without pretending the process is easy. The romances are not just about attraction. They are about making a future sturdy enough to live in.

The tone is gentler and more mature than some of the sports-heavy series, even though football is still part of the characters' lives. Renovation, guardianship, old friendships, and mutual loss do more of the heavy lifting than public games or team drama. That makes these books especially good for readers who like emotional contemporary romance with a strong domestic thread.

If you want Sorensen at her most tender, The Best Men is a strong choice. It is only two books, but they are tightly connected, deeply character-driven, and interested in the ways love can grow out of responsibility, repair, and the kind of shared grief that changes what home means.