Below is the complete list of Janet Evanovich’s Elsie Hawkins books in publication order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Elsie Hawkins Books in Publication Order
- Back to the Bedroom (1989)
Back to the Bedroom was published in 1989 and is listed as book #1 in the Elsie Hawkins series. - Smitten (1990)
Published in 1990, Smitten is listed as book #2 in the Elsie Hawkins series. - Wife for Hire (1990)
Wife for Hire is a 1990 release and appears as book #3 in the Elsie Hawkins series. - The Rocky Road to Romance (1991)
In the Elsie Hawkins series, The Rocky Road to Romance is book #4 and was published in 1991.
About Elsie Hawkins
Janet Evanovich’s Elsie Hawkins books belong to the earlier, romance-centered side of her career, well before Stephanie Plum became the overwhelming center of her public identity. That matters because this series reads differently from the later comic-crime novels most readers associate with her name. These books are lighter, more openly romantic, and built around attraction, banter, and small-town or close-community chaos rather than fugitive hunting or criminal capers. Simon & Schuster now groups Back to the Bedroom, Wife for Hire, Smitten, Manhunt, and The Rocky Road to Romance together as the Elsie Hawkins series, with Back to the Bedroom specifically identified there as “the first in the Elsie Hawkins series.”
That official grouping is useful because the series can look a little odd if you only know these books from their original mass-market-romance life. They were not initially branded in the same franchise-heavy way as Evanovich’s later work, and the modern Elsie Hawkins label brings them together as a recognizable cluster. Even so, they are best thought of as a looser romance series rather than a tightly serialized saga. The connection is tone, heroine style, and comic-romantic energy more than one heavily continuous plotline.
What ties the books together most strongly is the kind of heroine Evanovich is already refining here. Elsie Hawkins and the women around this series territory are not cool, elegant romance leads. They are impulsive, verbally lively, often underprepared for the trouble they walk into, and much more likely to improvise than to glide. You can already see the beginnings of the Evanovich mode that later became so commercially powerful: a woman in over her head, a charismatic man who may help or complicate matters, and a story that treats disaster as both emotionally real and very funny. The difference is that in the Elsie Hawkins books, the emphasis remains squarely on romance.
That is why publication order still helps, even if the books are not dependent on cliffhanger continuity. Reading from Back to the Bedroom forward lets you watch Evanovich’s comic-romance instincts settle into place. The official series page currently presents Back to the Bedroom as the latest featured volume but also names it as the first book, while listing the other four titles as part of the same series. Taken that way, the line has a satisfying progression from opposites-attract romantic comedy into other variations on pursuit, chemistry, and comic upheaval.
The books are also useful for understanding Evanovich’s broader bibliography. Her official novel list separates early romance, pre-Plum work, and later mystery-driven series, and the Elsie Hawkins books sit firmly in that earlier romance tradition even when they show flashes of the madcap pacing she would later amplify. They are not yet the full Evanovich mystery machine, but they are unmistakably part of the same creative DNA.
For readers who already have the list above, the best way to think about the Elsie Hawkins books is as an early Janet Evanovich romantic-comedy run gathered under a later series label. Read in publication order, they offer a good look at the writer before bounty hunters and Trenton became her defining world: witty, fast, flirtatious, and already very interested in the comic possibilities of a woman colliding headfirst with love and trouble.