Runaway

About the Runaway series

The Runaway series is built around an unusual connective device: a restored 1964 Cadillac that passes from woman to woman as it crosses the country, tying together five standalone romances about six friends who grew up together as runaway teenagers living in a California junkyard. Runaway Road opens the series as the group scatters into adulthood and the car becomes both a literal inheritance and a symbol of the family they made for themselves when their own families failed them.

Each subsequent book, Wild Highway, Quarter Miles, and Forsaken Trail, hands the wheel (and the plot) to a different member of the group, mixing road-trip romance with small-town Montana settings once the car's journey brings characters home. Dotted Lines closes the series a year after the first four, which released in rapid succession across 2020. The backstory, kids who built a family out of a junkyard and a car, gives the series more emotional weight than a typical linked-romance set, with found family and hard-won trust as the throughline connecting five otherwise separate love stories.

A five-book bindup titled The Runaways, collecting all five novels in one volume, was published in 2023; it isn't a new sixth entry, just a repackaging of the same five stories.

How to read this series

Publication order: Runaway Road, Wild Highway, Quarter Miles, Forsaken Trail, Dotted Lines. The first four books released within months of each other in 2020, so there's little downtime between entries, and Dotted Lines followed in 2021 to close the series. Each book is a standalone romance for a different member of the friend group, but the car passing between them and the shared junkyard backstory build cumulatively, so reading in order is recommended even though no single book ends on a cliffhanger.

If you see The Runaways listed separately, that's the 2023 bindup collecting all five books in one volume, not an additional story.