Below is the complete list of Janet Evanovich’s Culhane Family books in publication order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Culhane Family Books in Publication Order
By Janet Evanovich, Dorien Kelly
- Love in a Nutshell (2012)
Love in a Nutshell was published in 2012 and is listed as book #1 in the Culhane Family series. - The Husband List (2012)
Published in 2012, The Husband List is listed as book #2 in the Culhane Family series.
About Culhane Family
Janet Evanovich’s Culhane Family books are a small but interesting corner of her bibliography because they show a different side of her career from the long-running Stephanie Plum novels. These are coauthored books, written with Dorien Kelly, and they belong more to romance than comic mystery, even though they still carry some of the warmth, momentum, and strong character chemistry readers associate with Evanovich. Macmillan’s series page presents the Culhane Family as a connected line by Janet Evanovich and Dorien Kelly, while the available books are Love in a Nutshell and The Husband List.
What makes the series a little tricky is that it is not organized like Evanovich’s more familiar suspense lines. The connection here is family rather than one recurring investigator or one continuing caper setup. Love in a Nutshell is the more contemporary of the two, built around Matt Culhane and a romantic-suspense plot involving sabotage at his brewery, while The Husband List reaches back into an earlier family generation and follows Caroline Maxwell and Jack Culhane in a historical-romance setting. The official Evanovich page for The Husband List makes that family connection explicit by centering Jack Culhane, while the Love in a Nutshell page anchors the modern side through Matt Culhane.
That means publication order is useful, but the books do not function like a tightly serialized saga where one novel must be read immediately after the last to understand the plot. Instead, the reward of reading them in order is seeing the Culhane name and family identity become the thread that ties two different romantic stories together. The broader series framing comes from the family itself rather than from one uninterrupted narrative line. The Culhane Family as a series, but the shape is closer to linked family romance than to a conventional mystery franchise.
Tonally, the books sit much closer to Evanovich’s romance roots than to her later comic-crime brand. That matters if a reader is coming in expecting Stephanie Plum–style mayhem. The Culhane books are lighter, more relationship-centered, and more overtly interested in courtship, attraction, and emotional payoff than in slapstick criminal chaos. They are still commercial and fast-moving, but the pleasures are different: family legacy, romantic tension, and the contrast between independence and commitment. Evanovich’s own site separates her pre-Plum and coauthored romance work from the better-known mystery lines, which helps place the Culhane books in the right part of her career.
There is also a small publication-history detail that can confuse the order. Some third-party listings include Nuts about Love, but that is an omnibus gathering The Husband List and Love in a Nutshell, not a third core Culhane novel. For readers focused on the actual series, the backbone is still the two main books.
For readers who already have the list above, the best way to think about the Culhane Family books is as a compact linked-romance sequence rather than a large continuing Evanovich universe. Read in order, the books offer a neat family connection across different romantic setups and show Evanovich working in a more openly romance-driven mode than the one that made her most famous. They are a smaller branch of her shelf, but a useful one if you want to see how her career extends beyond bounty hunters, capers, and Trenton chaos.