BookSeriesInOrder.com





Book Notification

Darby Kane Books In Order

Book links take you to Amazon. As an Amazon Associate I earn money from qualifying purchases.

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Pretty Little Wife (2020)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Replacement Wife (2021)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Last Invitation (2022)Description / Buy at Amazon
The Engagement Party (2023)Description / Buy at Amazon

Darby Kane is the pseudonym of Helenkay Dimon, an erotic romance, contemporary and romantic romance author of more than forty novels. Her novels have been featured in many international and national venues and “Cosmo” magazine named her novels Red Hot Reads. Kane is a RITA Award winning finalist and also won the Best Book Award by “Reviewers Choice.” In addition to writing her novels, she has also served at the Romance Writers of America where she was the Policy Advisory Committee Chair. She also frequently teaches classes and workshops of romance and fiction writing. She currently makes her home in San Diego from where she writes her novels when she is not streaming her favorite shows on Netflix.

Kane did not start out as an author as all she wanted to be growing gup was Secretary of State. But even as a child, she was still drawn to storytelling, especially anything by her first favorite author Judy Blume. In books, she found an escape and often dreamed about moving to the fantastic worlds she read about. As an adult, she ended up in the capital Washington DC, where she had a very interesting bird’s eye view of romance. With so much power play in DC, many women had very interesting dating lives. While she regularly interacted with the powerful men in the capital she had met her husband in college and hence she was for the most part an onlooker. She would later marry her husband in what was a friends to lovers romance story that has inspired many of her novels. Similar to many employees at Capitol Hill, she ended up in law school and then went back to Washington to start working at a law firm as an associate. As a lawyer, she used to work all the time but everything paid off when she finally made partner. Nonetheless, there are many blurry years in between when she never saw a movie or attended any social events.

While Darby Kane was working as a lawyer in Washington, she represented a lot of CIA, FBI and even Secret Service clients. It is thus no surprise that much of her mystery novels usually involve undercover heroes. While none of her heroes are based on real client profiles, just living in the capital put that suspense, espionage and thriller stuff in her mind. She loved being a lawyer, litigation and her firm but it was hard and difficult work as she was a specialist in contested custody cases. It is not a job where you see people at their best and there is a lot of sadness that comes with the job. But it was at work that the spark for her novel writing career was lit. A lawyer who was leaving the law to go into music gave her three romance novels by Linda Lael Miller, Jayne Ann Krentz, and Julie Garwood. These novels changed her life as her focus started shifting once she read them . Darby Kane had spent her life helping people in relationships that were coming to an end but now she wanted to write something very different. She wanted to help write stories with happily ever after endings.

Some of Darby Kane’s earliest novels were romance titles that straddled the line between erotic and very hot. Once she stopped with the excuses and started giving more time to her writing career, it only took her one and a half years to get her debut published. She had entered into an online contest run by Lori Foster and made the final shortlist. This put her on the radar of Kate Duffy, a Kensington editor who published her first work. It has been many years since she decided to become a full time author and since then has written a ton of novels. She loves to watch a lot of true crime and British crime shows. Darby is also huge on people watching and gets many of her story ideas thinking “what would happen to this person.” After years writing as HelenKay Dimon, she started writing thriller novels as Darby Kane. She published “Pretty Little Wife,” her debut novel under her pseudonym, in 2020.

Darby Kane’s “Pretty Little Wife” introduces Lila Ridgefield. She had killed Aaron, her husband with great planning and preparation and afterwards parked his SUV with his body in it near the school, where he was a teacher. She had made sure to plant some raunchy and vile sex videos in his car just to show people that he was a horrible sexual predator. But then the body and the car go missing and she is afraid that maybe the man was not really dead. If he is alive, she knows that he will be coming for revenge. Another thing is that given that he has gone missing, no one is aware that he is a sexual predator. Lila also finds herself the lead suspect in the disappearance of her husband who is now presumed dead. A local crime podcast has been running a series about young women that had gone missing that they believe have been killed by a serial killer. But since her husband went missing, the podcast has also covered the disappearance. Both Aaron and Lila are from backgrounds with tragic deaths and murder and this could have been what had attracted them to each other. They felt a sense of safety that healthy normal people would not be able to understand.

Darby Kane’s “The Replacement Wife” is the story of wife and mother Elisa Wright. She has been living a quiet and nice life in a small tranquil town when everything changes. She becomes convinced that her brother in law Josh killed his first fiance and may have killed his subsequent girlfriend that had gone missing. While Josh had grieved the losses, he had gotten into a new relationship soon after. Elisa thinks the woman is in danger and wants to know what happened to the missing woman who had been her friend. As she searches for clues, she finds that she has to investigate her own family. She does not like what she unearths, especially the laptop that is full of incriminating information. When she strategically makes friends with her brother-in-law’s new girlfriend, she starts doubting what she thought about Josh. Elisa is wondering if the memories she has of an incident that happened several months back could have biased her against Josh. There is a lot at stake and she has to fight a strange illness and panic attacks to discover the truth before something bad happens to someone else.

Book Series In Order » Authors » Darby Kane

One Response to “Darby Kane”

  1. Kristine: 7 months ago

    Just finished Pretty Little Wife. A book that keeps you reading into the wee hours of the morning [on a week day]. Loved it.

    Reply

Leave a Reply