Calhoun Women

About the Calhoun Women series

The Calhoun Women follows four sisters — Catherine, Amanda, Lilah, and Suzanna — living together in their family's crumbling Victorian mansion on the Maine coast, united by a family legend: a lost emerald necklace, given to their great-grandmother by a mysterious sea captain, that's said to carry a curse until it's found and a wronged ancestor's story is set right. Courting Catherine pairs the eldest, no-nonsense Catherine, with Trenton St. James III, the wealthy investor helping restore the family's crumbling inn. A Man for Amanda, For the Love of Lilah, and Suzanna's Surrender each pair one of the remaining sisters with a man drawn into the search for the family's lost heirloom and the ghost story behind it, as the mystery of the necklace and the sisters' ancestor Bianca deepens with each book. Megan's Mate, published five years after the original quartet, catches up with a cousin, Megan, brought into the extended family circle, closing out the series with one more romance tied to the same Maine coast setting.

As in several of Roberts's early family sagas, the four original books were conceived and released together as a tight quartet, with the mystery of the missing emeralds and the ghost of Bianca Calhoun providing a shared thread beneath each sister's individual courtship.

How to read this series

Read the original quartet in publication order — Courting Catherine, A Man for Amanda, For the Love of Lilah, Suzanna's Surrender — since the mystery of the family's lost emerald necklace and the ghost of ancestor Bianca Calhoun builds across all four books and resolves by the end of Suzanna's Surrender. Megan's Mate arrived five years later as a stand-alone follow-up featuring an extended family member; it can be read as an epilogue to the original quartet rather than an essential fifth chapter of the mystery.