Below is the complete list of Susan Mallery’s Fool’s Gold books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Fool’s Gold Books
Publication Order of Fool’s Gold Short Stories Books
Publication Order of Fool’s Gold Non-Fiction Books
About Fool’s Gold
Susan Mallery’s Fool’s Gold series is a long contemporary romance sequence set in the fictional California town of Fool’s Gold, a place designed around community, friendship, family, festivals, gossip, and second chances. The series begins with Chasing Perfect in 2010 and grows through a large group of connected novels, holiday stories, novellas, and related extras, with Mallery’s own backlist placing Fool’s Gold titles across the main run from Chasing Perfect through Best of My Love, alongside companion pieces such as Only Us, Almost Summer, Halfway There, Yours for Christmas, and A Fool’s Gold Wedding.
The town itself is the series’ central invention. Fool’s Gold is not just a backdrop where romances happen; it is the emotional engine of the books. Local businesses, family connections, civic projects, charity events, weddings, holiday celebrations, and town traditions create the sense of a place where private life quickly becomes public knowledge. That can be embarrassing for the characters, but it also gives the series its warmth. People in Fool’s Gold are watched, teased, advised, and sometimes interfered with, but they are rarely allowed to fall apart completely alone.
The early books establish the series’ core appeal through heroines and heroes who arrive with emotional defenses already in place. Mallery often writes characters who have succeeded professionally or survived difficult histories, but who still struggle with trust, vulnerability, family expectations, or the fear of wanting too much. The romances are built around attraction and chemistry, but they also depend on belonging. Falling in love in Fool’s Gold usually means being drawn into the town’s wider network, not simply pairing off in isolation.
As the sequence expands, Fool’s Gold becomes increasingly ensemble-driven. Families, groups of friends, business owners, military veterans, athletes, artists, doctors, ranchers, and newcomers all move through the town’s social world. Some characters appear first in supporting roles before becoming central later, which is why publication order gives the strongest reading experience. Individual books can often stand alone as separate romances, but the emotional pleasure increases when familiar names, relationships, and places begin to accumulate.
The series also has a strong seasonal rhythm. Mallery uses summer festivals, weddings, Christmas events, and town celebrations to reinforce the idea that Fool’s Gold is a community readers return to as much as a series they proceed through. Holiday entries such as A Fool’s Gold Christmas, Christmas on 4th Street, Marry Me at Christmas, and related novellas lean into that promise especially strongly. They give the series a softer, festive register while keeping the same emphasis on emotional repair and found family.
Fool’s Gold eventually leads naturally toward Mallery’s Happily Inc books, a spin-off-style setting with its own wedding-town identity. That connection shows how effectively Mallery built Fool’s Gold as a romance world: large enough to sustain many couples, flexible enough for different tones, and warm enough that readers could move from one fictional community to another without losing the feeling of continuity.
The Fool’s Gold books endure because they understand the comfort of recurring place. Their plots are romantic, but their larger fantasy is communal: a town where heartbreak is noticed, friendship matters, and reinvention is possible at any age. Mallery’s best use of Fool’s Gold is not merely as an idealized small town, but as a setting where love becomes part of public life, shaped by neighbors, families, laughter, meddling, and the steady hope that the right person might already be closer than expected.