For years, when someone asked what I wrote, I had a simple answer: Victorian romance.

It wasn’t wrong. My books are set in Victorian England, and romance is always at their heart. My characters fall in love, usually despite having excellent reasons not to. There are drawing rooms and country estates, elegant gowns and complicated social rules. There are certainly enough titled gentlemen wandering through the pages to justify the word romance.

But over time, I began to realize that Victorian romance didn’t quite describe my books.

Because my characters are rarely allowed to concentrate exclusively on falling in love.

They’re too busy dealing with spies.

And thieves.

And murders, conspiracies, blackmail, political intrigue, secret identities, stolen jewels, kidnapping attempts, and people who have a distressing tendency to be considerably more dangerous than they first appear.

Apparently, I have trouble allowing my characters to simply attend a ball and enjoy themselves.

And once I started looking at my books from that perspective, I realized there was a much more precise description for what I write:

Victorian romantic suspense.

I Thought I Wrote Victorian Romance

When I first began writing historical romance, Victorian historical romance seemed like the natural description.

The Victorian setting matters enormously to me. I love researching the places my characters might have visited, the clothes they wore, the food they ate, the trains they traveled on, and the social expectations that shaped their lives.

And the romance matters just as much.

No matter what danger surrounds my characters, the emotional journey between the hero and heroine remains central to the story. The suspense doesn’t replace the romance. It complicates it.

But when I looked at the stories themselves, I realized something else was happening.

My Secrets and Seduction books have spies woven through the series. The Shadow of the Black Rose trilogy revolves around espionage, danger, secrets, and threats that extend well beyond the romantic relationships at its center.

Even books that begin with something comparatively contained—a secret, a theft, a suspicious stranger—have a habit of turning dangerous.

The suspense isn’t something I occasionally add to a Victorian romance.

It is part of the way I naturally tell stories.

So What Is Victorian Romantic Suspense?

Genre definitions can become surprisingly complicated, particularly when a book sits at the intersection of several categories. I don’t pretend to have the definitive taxonomy for Victorian romantic suspense, but I know what the term means for my books.

The romance provides the emotional heart of the story. The suspense provides a substantial part of the external plot. And both are shaped by the Victorian world in which the characters live.

Remove the romance, and it isn’t the same story.

Remove the danger, mystery, or intrigue, and it isn’t the same story either.

That’s the balance I enjoy.

Sometimes that means writing what could also be described as a Victorian spy romance. Sometimes the story leans toward a Victorian mystery romance, with a crime or unanswered question pulling the characters deeper into danger. More broadly, my books fit beneath the umbrella of historical romantic suspense.

But the Victorian setting is more than scenery for those stories.

It changes what danger looks like.

Why the Victorian Era Is Perfect for Romantic Suspense

One of the pleasures of writing suspense in the nineteenth century is that so many things we take for granted simply weren’t available.

There was no mobile phone in a pocket.

No instant photograph sent to the police.

No quick internet search to discover whether the charming gentleman who had just introduced himself was really who he claimed to be.

Information moved at the speed available to it.

That speed was changing dramatically during the Victorian period. Railways transformed travel. Telegraphy transformed communication. Newspapers could spread information—and scandal—to an enormous audience. Modern policing and investigative methods were developing.

But those systems still had limitations.

That creates wonderful possibilities for a suspense writer.

A journey mattered. Distance mattered. Being stranded somewhere could genuinely leave a character isolated. A message might arrive too late. A person could disappear into a city and be extraordinarily difficult to find.

Identity itself could be surprisingly slippery.

And then there was reputation.

For Victorian men and women—particularly those moving within respectable society—reputation could have enormous consequences. A secret didn’t have to involve murder or treason to be dangerous. The wrong accusation, the wrong rumor, or simply being discovered in the wrong place with the wrong person could alter someone’s future.

That gives a writer two different kinds of stakes to play with.

There are the obvious physical dangers: spies, criminals, conspirators, thieves, and murderers.

And there are the quieter dangers created by society itself.

For a romantic suspense novel, that combination is irresistible.

The period also offers an extraordinary historical backdrop. Britain was undergoing enormous technological, political, and social change. Railways were shrinking distances. The empire was expanding. Europe was politically volatile. New ideas collided with old expectations.

All of that creates opportunities for secrets.

And I do love a good secret.

Why I’m Leaning Harder into Victorian Romantic Suspense

The interesting thing about this realization is that I’m not actually changing what I write.

I’m becoming more precise about describing it.

For a long time, I emphasized the Victorian romance side of my books. That made sense. They are romances, and I never want readers to wonder whether the relationship between the hero and heroine is going to matter.

It does.

But calling them simply Victorian romances leaves out too much of what makes these stories mine.

I want the mystery.

I want the intrigue.

I want characters who have to figure things out rather than simply react to events. I want intelligent heroines who notice when something doesn’t add up. I want heroes with secrets they may have very good reasons for keeping.

And yes, I apparently want spies.

Quite a lot of spies.

So I’m leaning more deliberately into Victorian romantic suspense—not by transforming my books into something different, but by embracing the elements that have been there all along.

It feels less like a rebranding than finally putting the correct label on the box.

What You Can Expect from My Victorian Romantic Suspense

If you’ve already read some of my books, much of this will sound familiar.

If you’re discovering my stories for the first time because you were searching for Victorian romantic suspense, here’s what you’ll find in them.

Romance will always be central. Whatever mystery needs solving or villain needs stopping, I’m ultimately interested in two people and what happens when their lives become tangled together.

But I also want them to have something to do while they’re falling in love.

They might uncover a conspiracy.

They might hunt for a thief.

They might become entangled with spies, political schemes, dangerous secrets, or crimes that refuse to remain safely in the past.

They will almost certainly discover that the person beside them is more complicated than they originally believed.

And through all of it, I want the Victorian world to feel like an essential part of the story rather than a painted backdrop.

That’s the combination I love most: romance, danger, intrigue, and history, all tangled together.

It turns out I’ve been writing Victorian romantic suspense for quite a while.

I simply needed to give it its proper name.