Devil in Disguise

Devil in Disguise is the seventh book in Lisa Kleypas’s Ravenels series, published in 2021 and continuing the late Victorian historical romance saga that began with Cold Hearted Rake. The novel sits at the intersection of the Ravenels series and Kleypas’s earlier Wallflowers novels, with the central heroine Lady Merritt Sterling being the daughter of two characters from the wider Wallflowers extended universe, and the central hero Keir MacRae being a Scottish whisky distiller whose own complicated origins drive much of the plot.

Merritt is a young widow who has been running her late husband’s shipping business in London with the kind of competence and energy that the Victorian business world was not really prepared for in a woman. Keir MacRae arrives in London to negotiate a difficult business situation involving his whisky distillery and ends up staying at Merritt’s London townhouse after a violent attack leaves him needing somewhere safe to recover. The slow recognition between the two of them that what is developing is more complicated than the practical hospitality that brought him into her household drives the central romance forward.

The complication that the novel spends much of its page count working through involves Keir’s actual identity. He has been raised believing he was the orphaned son of a Scottish farmer, but the events of the novel slowly reveal that his actual parentage is considerably more elevated than he had ever imagined, with implications for the wider plot that connect back to the Wallflowers extended universe in ways that longtime Lisa Kleypas readers find particularly satisfying.

Lisa Kleypas writes the kind of historical romance that combines real period detail with the emotional satisfaction of the genre at its best. Her late career work in the Ravenels series has shown her at her most accomplished, with the careful psychological work she does with her characters and the connections to her earlier novels giving the books additional weight beyond just the central romance. Merritt is one of her stronger heroines, with a real working life that the romance has to accommodate rather than overwriting, and Keir is a particular kind of Kleypas hero whose origins and his slow recognition of who he actually is give him distinctive depth.

For longtime Kleypas fans, Devil in Disguise is one of the most loved entries in the Ravenels series. For new readers, the series rewards being read in order, but Devil in Disguise can be picked up as a standalone with some loss of context.