Renee Desselle is a beautiful young widow who owns a thriving French Quarter millinery. Irishman William Collins is a newcomer to New Orleans who manages his uncle’s prosperous cotton brokerage. Each harbors a secret that makes a new love impossible.

Fans of The Willing Widow will find familiar, fascinating characters in The Devious Debutante, a Victorian romance set in New Orleans in 1886—the Gilded Age. It immerses readers in Mardi Gras revelry as costumed and masked saints and sinners dance at formal balls and watch torch-lit parades wind from Bourbon Street to Canal Street to St. Charles Avenue.

The daughter of a fisherman in Vacherie on the Mississippi River, Michelle D’Artois falls in love with Auguste Fabre, handsome son of the largest landowner in the parish. They pledge their love and promise to meet and marry in the city in six weeks. But when Michelle climbs from her window before dawn, boards a steamer and arrives in New Orleans on Christmas morning, Fabre fails to meet her.

Fans of the Love in New Orleans Series have been worried about Vespasian Colville since the publication of The Willing Widow in 2014. Many wonder why such a man—handsome, rich, charming to elderly chaperones, playful with animals and children—has not found a wife. They’ve said as much to Helen and me at every opportunity. I remind them he’s been expelled from two Jesuit colleges (where the good fathers are known for their leniency), he spends his days drinking and seducing married women, his nights gambling and visiting ladies of the evening. Is there a lady in the world who would have him? There is one--in the city of New Orleans--who matches him in intelligence and wit. The problem is, she despises him.