Saying Goodbye to the Riddle Sisters

Here's the cleaned-up version:

There is a particular feeling that comes with typing the last line of a series, and I am not sure I have ever fully gotten used to it. Recently, I finished the sixth and final Riddle Sisters book, Lady Veronica's Lost Gem, and ever since, I have been sitting with that strange mix of relief and quiet sadness that always arrives when a long project comes to its end. It's like running a marathon (I assume, I've never done it!) and crossing the finish line: happy to have made it, exhausted from the journey.

The Riddle Sisters has been one of the great pleasures of my writing life. Six books, six sisters, and a mystery threaded through all of them like a ribbon you only notice once you step back and see it complete. I think that was the part I loved most. Each book stands on its own as a sweet and clean Regency romance, with its own courtship and its own happy ending, but underneath all of them a single quiet question kept turning, book to book, until it finally resolved in Veronica's story.

I won't spoil it here, because half the joy of a series like this is watching the pieces fall into place yourself. What I will say is that building a slow-burn romance with mystery across six Regency romance novels meant I had to plant things early that would not pay off for years of writing. There were moments, somewhere around book four, when I genuinely worried I had set myself a puzzle I could not solve. If you want to know what that looks like, imagine notecards filled out, spreadsheets, and the coffee pot brewing endlessly. Bringing it all together in the final book, and having it land the way I always hoped it would, has been deeply satisfying.

And yet. There is the sadness too. I have lived with these sisters for a long time. I knew each of their quirks: which one was quickest to laugh, which one held her feelings closest. Closing the door on them for the last time feels less like finishing a job and more like saying goodbye to people I have come to love.

But here is the thing about goodbyes in this work: they are rarely permanent. One of the quiet gifts of being an author is that you can always go back, open an old door, and step into a world you thought you had left behind.

Which is exactly what I have been doing lately. Next week I want to tell you about a series I am returning to after far too long away, and why I decided it deserved a fresh life. More on that soon.