Cold-Hearted Rake

Cold Hearted Rake is the first book in Lisa Kleypas’s Ravenels series, the Victorian historical romance saga that launched in 2015 and has continued across multiple subsequent novels. The series introduces the Ravenel family, a group of distant relatives who unexpectedly inherit an aristocratic title and estate after the deaths of the previous earls, leaving the eldest brother Devon Ravenel and his various siblings struggling to figure out how to manage the unexpected inheritance.

This novel focuses on Devon Ravenel, the new Earl of Trenear, and Kathleen Trenear, the young widow of the previous earl whose death has set the entire situation in motion. Kathleen has been at the family’s Hampshire estate since her brief and unhappy marriage to the late Theo, and she has been managing the household and the welfare of Theo’s three sisters since his death. Devon arrives at the estate planning to sell off the property and clear his hands of the inheritance as quickly as possible. The complications develop when he discovers that the entail attached to the title makes selling impossible, and that the estate is in considerably worse financial condition than the family had let on.

The central romance develops between Devon and Kathleen across the early chapters of the novel, with both of them initially hostile to each other for reasons that the wider plot slowly clarifies. Devon’s reputation as a cold hearted rake had been earned across his earlier London life, and Kathleen’s experience of her marriage to Devon’s cousin Theo had given her plenty of reason to be suspicious of the new Ravenel earl. The slow recognition that what is developing between them is more complicated than either initially expected drives the central romance, while the wider plot involving the estate, the three Ravenel sisters who become Devon’s wards, and the various practical and political complications of the inheritance provides the structural framework.

Lisa Kleypas writes the kind of historical romance that combines real period detail with the emotional satisfaction of the genre at its best. The Ravenels series has shown her at her most accomplished, with the careful psychological work she does with her characters and the wider world building of the connected family saga giving the books additional weight beyond just the central romances. Cold Hearted Rake establishes the family and the world that the rest of the series develops.

For readers new to Lisa Kleypas, this is an excellent entry point into her late career work. For longtime Kleypas fans, the Ravenels series is one of her most loved projects and Cold Hearted Rake is the natural starting point.