Second Chance Romance

I posted a reel over on Insta today featuring my second chance romances and was surprised to realize I've only written four of them. It's a trope I quite like - but it's perhaps not my favorite trope. (If I do a reel of age gap romances, I'll have to go through 90% of my catalogue, lol, and I will, so BOLO for that). 

It's always necessary, when writing a series, to consult previous books in the series to make sure you're getting details and timelines right. There have been days I've spent more than an hour flipping through pages and searching through Word docs hunting down a lone name of a throwaway tertiary character mentioned once. But it's interesting, beneficial, sometimes embarrassing but oftentimes enlightening, to take a removed, and objective look back at older books. 

A few observations: 

• Each of these books is classified in a different subgenre: MC romance; romantic suspense; contemporary family drama; contemporary M/M mafia romance.
• Each of these books is either a standalone, or the first in a series, in the case of Fearless and Keep You. On reflection, I love starting a series with that sense of personal history between characters, to immediately place readers deep into the world of the story, its family, its setting. It feels established that way. 
• Keep You was the first book I published, back in 2012, and there's...quite a lot I'd do differently, if I was writing it today. But it would be silly to dwell on those what ifs and lament the writer I was; better instead to be thankful for all that it taught me, and appreciate the fact that it's not just writing books, but completing books that teaches you the most about storytelling. 
• By contrast, College Town is my latest release (LHM notwithstanding), and looking at the two of them side-by-side highlights, for me at least, the confidence I've gained when it comes to on-the-page romantic relationships; their emotions, and physicality, and the bluntness with which things can be stated; conversely, it shows where I've better learned to exercise subtlety and restraint when necessary.  
• Whatever Remains was my first foray into mystery/suspense, half romance, half police procedural. I purposefully dabbled in a stylistic shift with the prose, and got to play around with writing a male lead who's very hard to root for, but who was a lot of fun for that very reason. 
• And of course Fearless was the start of Dartmoor, and my first MC-focused novel. With it, I wanted to write a sprawling Southern epic in the tradition of Pat Conroy, and Anne Rivers Siddons, but with a dark and bloody biker twist. 

So here are four very different flavors of second chance romance, each fun and special to write in their own ways, all available now at Amazon, B&N, and Kobo. 

I think I know the answer, but if you've read them all, which is your favorite? And which, if any, do you still want to, or plan to read?