Below is the complete list of Tessa Bailey’s Big Shots books in publication order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Big Shots Books in Publication Order
- Fangirl Down (2024)
- The Au Pair Affair (2024)
- Dream Girl Drama (2025)
- Pitcher Perfect (2025)
- Catch Her If You Can (2026)
About Big Shots
Tessa Bailey’s Big Shots series is where her contemporary romance style meets an overtly sporty, high-gloss rom-com setup. These books are not quiet relationship studies or low-stakes beach reads. They are built for maximum chemistry, strong banter, emotional volatility, and the kind of heightened attraction Bailey handles particularly well: two people colliding hard, often from very different emotional angles, then discovering that desire is the easy part and vulnerability is the real challenge. The sports setting gives the series a clear identity, but the appeal is still unmistakably Bailey’s. The games, careers, and public pressure matter, yet the books run on personality, voice, and the push-pull between swagger and sincerity.
The series begins with Fangirl Down, which sets the tone better than any abstract description could. It establishes the Big Shots world as one where professional athletes may look larger than life from the outside, but the romance depends on stripping away that public surface. Bailey has always liked heroes with bravado and heroines who destabilize that confidence in surprising ways, and this series gives her an especially good framework for it. Fame, competition, routine, physical discipline, and media attention all raise the pressure around the relationships, but they also make the emotional reveals land harder. These are people used to performance, which means intimacy often arrives through disruption.
One of the strengths of Big Shots is that it is a true connected series without becoming overly dependent on one continuous plot. Each book has its own central couple and its own romance arc, so readers are still getting the satisfaction of a complete love story every time. At the same time, the books clearly belong to the same world. Characters overlap, side figures gain greater significance, and one novel’s supporting cast can become the emotional center of the next. That is why publication order matters. You can read an individual book on its own, but reading in sequence gives the series more texture because Bailey likes planting sparks early and then following them later. The world feels more alive when familiar names are allowed to keep moving rather than disappearing once their own book is done.
That becomes especially noticeable as the series continues through The Au Pair Affair and Dream Girl Drama. The underlying structure stays recognizably Bailey: strong attraction, sharp verbal energy, emotional hesitation, and a hero who usually has more depth than his initial confidence suggests. But the series does not feel repetitive, because she changes the interpersonal dynamics from book to book. The sports backdrop remains a unifying frame, yet each romance finds its own pressure points. Some pairings lean harder into protectiveness, some into chaos, some into opposites who should never work but clearly will. The result is a sequence that feels linked by atmosphere and storytelling instinct rather than by one recycled formula.
Another reason the books work better in order is tonal buildup. Big Shots is not just “sports romance” in a generic sense. Bailey uses the setting to create a particular blend of public and private stakes. Athletes live by routine, performance, discipline, injury, and scrutiny. Romance enters that space as something destabilizing but also clarifying. The characters may be physically gifted and publicly admired, yet emotionally they are often far less composed than they seem. Bailey understands that imbalance and uses it well. Her heroes, in particular, often project certainty long before they have actually figured themselves out.
For readers who already have the list above, the most useful way to think about Big Shots is as a modern Bailey showcase: sports-centered, commercial, fast-moving, and emotionally direct. It belongs to the bestselling phase of her career, where she is writing with full confidence in her own rhythm and audience. Publication order is the best fit not because the books are hard to follow otherwise, but because this is a series that rewards accumulation. The recurring world grows richer, the character handoffs become more satisfying, and the emotional payoff is stronger when you see how Bailey builds anticipation from one romance to the next.