Hello Stranger

Hello Stranger is the fourth book in Lisa Kleypas’s Ravenels series, the Victorian historical romance saga that follows the Ravenel family and their connections through 1870s England. This novel turns to Garrett Gibson, the young Englishwoman who has become one of the very first female physicians in Britain, and Ethan Ransom, a Scotland Yard detective whose investigation into a series of dangerous London criminal operations brings him into Garrett’s professional orbit.

Garrett Gibson is one of Kleypas’s most distinctive heroines. A real working physician at a time when female doctors were almost unheard of in England, she has built her practice through sheer determination and through the support of her father and a small number of progressive male colleagues. The Victorian medical world in which she works is rendered with care, including the social pressures, the institutional resistance, and the daily challenges of practicing medicine in a profession that did not particularly want her there. Ethan Ransom is the perfect counterpart. A working class detective whose own background gives him reasons to admire what Garrett has built, while his work brings him into territory that no respectable Victorian physician should have anything to do with.

The romance develops alongside the suspense plot involving the dangerous criminal operations that Ethan has been investigating, with the inevitable moment when the danger reaches into Garrett’s medical practice and forces the two of them into closer cooperation than either has been willing to admit they wanted. Lisa Kleypas handles the balance between the period romance and the suspense elements with the kind of practiced confidence that her readers have come to expect from her work in the Hathaways and now the Ravenels series.

What distinguishes Kleypas’s late career historical romance from a lot of the broader genre is the willingness to give her heroines real careers and real interior lives that go beyond just being objects of the central romance. Garrett’s medical practice is integral to who she is, and the romance has to accommodate her professional life rather than the other way around.

For longtime Kleypas fans, Hello Stranger is one of the strongest entries in the Ravenels series. For new readers, the series rewards being read in order, but Hello Stranger can be picked up as a standalone.