Below is the complete list of Richard Paul Evans’ Mistletoe Collection books in order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Publication Order of Mistletoe Collection Books
About Mistletoe Collection
Richard Paul Evans’s Mistletoe Collection is a three-novel holiday romance series built around people who enter the Christmas season carrying loneliness, disappointment, or emotional wounds they have not fully resolved. Beginning with The Mistletoe Promise, followed by The Mistletoe Inn and The Mistletoe Secret, the books share a seasonal atmosphere and an interest in unexpected relationships, but they do not follow one continuing couple or storyline. Each novel introduces new characters and reaches its own conclusion, making the collection thematic rather than sequential.
The Mistletoe Promise centers on Elise Dutton, a divorced woman whose painful past has made Christmas a season she would rather avoid. Her routine changes when Nicholas Derr approaches her with an unusual proposition: they will pretend to be a couple throughout the holiday season so neither has to face the social expectations of Christmas alone. He even creates a set of rules intended to keep the arrangement simple and emotionally safe.
Predictably, the agreement becomes more complicated as their manufactured relationship begins creating genuine comfort. Both Elise and Nicholas are withholding parts of their histories, and the novel gradually turns from a fake-dating premise into a story about guilt, vulnerability, and whether people who believe themselves undeserving of happiness can accept another chance at it.
The Mistletoe Inn shifts to Kimberly Rossi, a thirty-two-year-old woman whose romantic life has included two failed engagements and a divorce. Despite her own disappointments, Kimberly dreams of becoming a romance novelist. She attends a nine-day writers’ retreat in Vermont, partly to pursue that ambition and partly because the celebrated but reclusive author H. T. Cowell is scheduled to appear.
At the retreat she meets Zeke, another aspiring writer. Their conversations about fiction gradually become conversations about the emotional defenses Kimberly has built around herself. Zeke is supportive and perceptive, but he is also concealing parts of his own life. Writing becomes the novel’s central metaphor: Kimberly has to decide whether she can risk honesty and vulnerability in her relationships in the same way a writer must risk putting something genuine on the page.
The Mistletoe Secret follows Alex Bartlett, who becomes fascinated by an anonymous blogger using the initials LBH. Her posts describe profound loneliness with such openness that Alex begins feeling connected to a woman he has never met. Clues in her writing lead him to Midway, Utah, where he hopes to identify her.
His search introduces him to Aria, a waitress at the Mistletoe Diner who helps him navigate the town and his increasingly complicated assumptions about the woman he believes he is looking for. The story develops around the difference between an imagined connection and the person directly in front of you, using secrecy and mistaken expectations to question how well anyone can know another person through the version of themselves they choose to reveal.
The three novels share Evans’s familiar concerns with broken trust, regret, emotional isolation, and second chances. Christmas provides the setting in which characters are especially conscious of companionship and absence, but the romances depend less on holiday spectacle than on people confronting truths they have avoided.
Because there are no continuing protagonists, the books can be read independently. Publication order nevertheless preserves the collection’s intended progression and its changing variations on holiday romance: a relationship deliberately invented, one discovered at a writers’ retreat, and one beginning with the search for an unknown person. Together, they form a compact seasonal collection about people who approach Christmas expecting loneliness and discover that connection often arrives in a form they did not plan.