Below is the complete list of Colleen Coble’s Tupelo Grove books in publication order. For this series, the chronological reading order is the same as the order of publication.
Tupelo Grove Books in Publication Order
with Rick Acker
- What We Hide (2024)
- Where Secrets Lie (2025)
- When Justice Comes (2026)
About Tupelo Grove
Colleen Coble’s Tupelo Grove books are a recent romantic-suspense series written with Rick Acker, and from the beginning they have a slightly different feel from many of Coble’s earlier coastal mysteries. The setting still matters a great deal, but here the emotional and investigative center is tied to Tupelo Grove University, old family influence, legal conflict, and the kind of historical wrongs that do not stay buried simply because a community would prefer silence. The series is built around Savannah Webster and Hezekiah “Hez” Webster, whose broken marriage, lingering grief, and hard-won loyalty give the books their strongest emotional thread.
The main sequence currently consists of What We Hide, Where Secrets Lie, and When Justice Comes. That structure matters because Tupelo Grove is not a loose label for unrelated suspense novels. It is a clearly connected trilogy, and it reads best that way. The first book introduces the world and the central conflict, the second deepens the danger and the family-history dimension, and the third pushes the series toward a full conclusion. These books are interested in immediate suspense, certainly, but they are also interested in accumulation. Secrets do not simply appear and vanish from one installment to the next. They keep widening.
What We Hide establishes the tone especially well. Savannah has returned to teach history at Tupelo Grove University, a school her family helped found, while Hez reenters her life at the very moment she least wants him there. The series gets a lot of force from that second-chance structure, but it never lets the romance float free from the mystery. Their estrangement is not decorative. It shapes how they investigate, how they trust, and how they survive. The first book is strongest when it lets murder, pre-Columbian artifacts, family legacy, and marital fracture all press against each other at once.
That layering is one of the things that makes Tupelo Grove stand out. Coble has always been good at writing women under pressure, but with Rick Acker’s influence the books lean a little more openly into legal and institutional conflict. Hez is not just a romantic lead who happens to be nearby when danger arrives. His role as an attorney matters. The series repeatedly works through custody, law, inheritance, and questions of power that feel as procedural as they do emotional. That gives the books a firmer legal-suspense edge than some of Coble’s earlier series, even while they remain recognizably romantic suspense at heart.
Where Secrets Lie continues that pressure instead of resetting the world. By then, the books have settled into their real identity: not just stories about a troubled couple solving dangerous mysteries, but stories about how family history, money, and institutional legacy can poison everything around them. The university setting helps with that. Campuses often carry old prestige and old rot in equal measure, and this series uses that well. Tupelo Grove is a place of scholarship and heritage on the surface, but underneath it holds resentment, concealed motives, and long memory.
Then When Justice Comes brings the trilogy to its natural close. By that point, Savannah and Hez are no longer simply trying to survive one crisis at a time. They are trying to secure a future in the middle of legal battles, family conflict, and revenge that has been building across the whole series. That ending suits the books. The trilogy has always been about more than uncovering one hidden truth. It is about whether two damaged people can build a life while the past keeps making demands on them.
Within Colleen Coble’s wider body of work, Tupelo Grove feels like a confident later-career variation on her established strengths. It still offers faith-tinged emotional restoration, romantic tension, and danger rooted in hidden history, but the collaboration with Acker gives it a more legal and institutional texture. The result is a trilogy that feels slightly tougher, more layered, and more grounded in questions of justice than some of her earlier place-driven suspense lines.
Taken together, the Tupelo Grove books offer a connected romantic-suspense trilogy where family secrets, university history, and damaged love all feed the same fire. The setting gives the series its atmosphere, but the real draw is the way Savannah and Hez have to fight for truth and for each other at the same time.