The Impossible Julian Strande Books in Order

The Impossible Julian Strande is Kingsley's haunted-house romance, and it is one of her most openly gothic setups. A sprawling old estate, a caretaker job that feels too good to be true, a living owner with secrets, and the ghost of a dead magician who is much too interested in the heroine, that is the kind of trouble these books enjoy.

Alice Monroe arrives at Strande Estate because she needs work. What she gets instead is a house with 192 rooms, a charming and odd employer named Charles Mensonge, and the lingering presence of Julian Strande, Charles's infamous great-granduncle and a magician whose hold on the place did not end with death. The estate is full of illusions, half-truths, and emotional traps, which makes it a perfect setting for a story about being seduced by something impossible.

Julian is the center of the series' appeal. He is a ghost, but not a wispy or passive one. He is clever, theatrical, manipulative, and very good at turning longing into a kind of haunting of its own. Alice's growing bond with him is the point, but the books keep asking what it means to love someone who is not just dead, but bound up in layers of deception.

There is also a slightly playful streak under the gloom. The magician angle gives the series a love of performance and misdirection, so the story often feels like a trick box, with one hidden panel opening into another. The house itself is a character, and a very nosy one.

This is a duet first and foremost.

Read Illusions of Grandeur and then Ghosts & Liars for the main arc. The Impossible Julian Strande is useful as a collected edition, and The Astonishing Strande Brothers works as a companion piece once you already know the world. If you want ghosts, glamour, and a romance that is as eerie as it is seductive, this is the lane.