The Betsy Books in Order

The Betsy books follow the Hardeman family and their company, Bethlehem Motors, through boom, crisis, and reinvention in the American car industry. Across The Betsy and its sequel The Stallion, Harold Robbins turns Detroit into a stage where family grudges and boardroom battles matter as much as horsepower.

In The Betsy, aging founder Loren Hardeman, known as Number One, refuses to watch his beloved company fade. His grandson, Loren Hardeman III, runs the business day to day and thinks the future lies in diversification, not risky new cars. Number One secretly brings in Angelo Perino, a daring race driver and gifted engineer, to design a radical, fuel‑efficient car he plans to call the Betsy, after his great‑granddaughter.

The project throws open every fault line inside the family. Old affairs, whispered scandals, and buried betrayals rise alongside engineering challenges and labor tensions. Angelo finds himself entangled with more than just blueprints; he is drawn into the complicated lives and beds of the Hardeman women, even as rivals inside and outside the company work to sabotage the car.

The Stallion returns to the same world in the 1970s. Angelo is older but still the man Number One trusts to save Bethlehem Motors, while Loren Hardeman III has grown only more resentful and calculating. A new car, the Stallion, becomes the centerpiece of another struggle for control, fought with proxy votes, secret deals, and personal revenge.

The sequel widens the lens: foreign competition, especially from Japan, high‑stakes partnerships, and the art market all weave into the plot through Angelos charismatic wife, Cindy, and their children. Once again, sex and power are never far apart from test tracks and design studios.

Read together, the two novels sketch a full arc of an American industrial dynasty trying to adapt as times change. Readers can expect melodrama, explicit encounters, and plenty of insider‑style detail about how a new car moves from idea to showroom, all wrapped around the question of who really gets to drive the Hardeman empire.