Devil’s Daughter

Devil’s Daughter is the fifth book in Lisa Kleypas’s Ravenels series, published in 2019. The novel sits at the intersection of the Ravenels series and Kleypas’s earlier Wallflowers novels, with the central heroine Phoebe Ravenel being the daughter of Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent, and Evangeline, the central couple of the much loved Wallflowers entry The Devil in Winter. Longtime Kleypas fans had been waiting for years for Phoebe and her brother Gabriel to get their own books, and Devil’s Daughter delivered the long anticipated story.

Phoebe is a young widow at the start of the novel, having lost her childhood sweetheart Henry to a long illness several years earlier. She has come to a country house party at her aunt and uncle’s estate, accompanied by her two young sons and trying to figure out what kind of life she is going to build for herself now that the early grief has begun to ease. At the party she meets West Ravenel, the rakish younger brother of the current Earl of Trenear who has spent the previous several books in the series transforming himself from a wastrel into a serious estate manager. The complication is significant. West had been one of Henry’s most relentless tormentors at school, a fact that Phoebe knows from the years of stories Henry told her, and the slow recognition that the man West has become is not at all the boy he was in his youth drives the central tension of the novel.

Lisa Kleypas writes the kind of historical romance that combines real period detail with the emotional satisfaction of the genre at its best. The connection to the earlier Wallflowers novels gives Devil’s Daughter additional weight for longtime fans, with appearances by Sebastian and Evie that are particularly satisfying given how loved the original couple had been. Phoebe is a strong heroine, more emotionally complex than the standard romance protagonist, and her grief for Henry is treated with the seriousness the material demands. West’s transformation across the Ravenels series pays off here, with his earlier scenes in the previous books providing the foundation for the man Phoebe is going to recognize.

For longtime Kleypas fans, Devil’s Daughter is one of the most loved entries in either the Ravenels or the wider Wallflowers extended universe.