O'Hurleys

About the O'Hurleys series

The O'Hurleys follows four siblings raised in a traveling vaudeville-style family act, each of whom has built a different adult life and career after leaving the family stage. The Last Honest Woman centers on Abigail, the eldest, now a widowed single mother running a horse farm, and her guarded romance with the father of her sons' friend. Dance to the Piper follows Maddy, a professional dancer, and a driven Wall Street businessman who hires her for reasons that have nothing to do with romance at first. Skin Deep turns to Trace, the family's only son, an actor whose public image collides with a reporter determined to expose the real man behind it. Without a Trace, published two years after the original trilogy, completes the quartet with the youngest sister, Chantel, an actress, and the private investigator hired by her own family to track her down after she goes missing.

The O'Hurley parents' own touring performance history, and the siblings' shared instinct to protect one another even as adults, gives the series its emotional throughline: every sibling's romance is shadowed by the same close, unconventional upbringing that shaped them all.

How to read this series

Read in publication order — The Last Honest Woman, Dance to the Piper, Skin Deep, Without a Trace — the original trilogy introduces the four O'Hurley siblings and their parents' vaudeville background, and Without a Trace, arriving two years later, completes the set with the youngest sibling, Chantel. Each book is a self-contained romance, so the series can be sampled out of order, but reading in sequence gives the fullest picture of the O'Hurley family as a whole.