The Highlander Series

The Highlander Series collects Maya Banks’s three book Scottish historical romance series, originally published as In Bed with a Highlander, Seduction of a Highland Lass, and Never Love a Highlander. The series is one of Banks’s departures from her more typical contemporary romance and romantic suspense work, and it shows her working in the medieval Scottish historical romance subgenre that has been a steady seller in the wider romance market for decades.

The series follows the three sons of the McCabe clan, whose father has been killed by a treacherous neighboring clan and whose family fortunes have to be rebuilt across the events of the connected novels. Each book focuses on one of the three brothers, his developing romance with the woman who will change his life, and the wider political and military complications that the McCabe clan has to navigate in the dangerous late medieval Scottish Highlands setting. Banks handles the historical material with the kind of care that the subgenre rewards, with attention to the specific clan culture, the political conflicts, and the daily realities of medieval Highland life giving the romances additional weight beyond just the central pairings.

Maya Banks brings her gift for emotionally intense relationships to the historical setting, with the central couples having to navigate the constraints of medieval Highland society alongside the more universal romantic complications that her contemporary work has always handled well. Her heroes in the series are protective in ways that the medieval setting makes more believable than some of her contemporary heroes’ protectiveness can be, and her heroines are women whose strength has to be exercised within the genuine constraints of their period rather than just against modern obstacles dressed in historical costume.

The Highlander series gives Banks readers who came to her through her contemporary work the chance to see her stretching her range in productive ways. The historical setting changes what she can do with the conventions of romance, and the series rewards readers willing to follow her into the slightly different territory. For readers who enjoy Scottish Highland historical romance from authors like Karen Marie Moning’s earlier Highlander novels, Hannah Howell, Monica McCarty, or Donna Grant, Maya Banks’s Highlander series sits comfortably in the same neighborhood.

The boxed set format gives readers the entire connected trilogy in a single package, which is the natural way to read this kind of series. The three novels build on each other and rewards being read in publication order. For longtime Maya Banks fans curious about her historical work, this series is essential.