The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin (2025, Australia) is a direct sequel to The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies (2023, Australia), a Regency crime/romance novel, from a writer whose previous work was a Regency dark fantasy trilogy (plus a straight-up fantasy and a straight-up crime novel). I really enjoyed The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies, so picking up what looks to be the second book in a series was a no-brainer.

Lady Augusta, Gus, and Lady Julia are in their early forties and independently wealthy. Lady Gus has never wed, Lady Julia is a widow. In The Benevolent Society of Ill-Mannered Ladies, they were held up by a highwayman, who proved to be a lord transported twenty years earlier for killing someone in a duel. He was back to rescue his sister, who had been put in an insane asylum by their brother, the current title holder, for being a lesbian. Lady Gus and Lady Julia get involved in Lord Evan’s plan to free Lady Hester, and Lady Gus gets involved with Lord Evan.

The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin carries pretty much straight on from the end of the first book. Lady Gus and Lady Julia freed Lady Hester and are now keeping her, and her partner, hidden. Lady Julia is enjoying the company of Mr Kent, the Bow Street Runner who helped them. Lord Evan is still in hiding, but it seems he might not have killed his opponent in that duel, so he and Lady Gus are hunting for evidence to exonerate him. However, there’s a vicious thieftaker on his trail, and it’s someone in the Exalted Brethren of Rack and Ruin, a gentleman’s club not unlike the Hellfire Club, who’s pulling the strings. Lord Evan’s involvement is a mystery, but they’re a bad lot – women have been known to enter their club house and not come out. Meanwhile, Lady Hester’s brother is trying to track her down, and the brother of Lady Gus and Lady Julia has things to say about their behaviour…

People have been churning out these sorts of novels since Georgette Heyer first invented the genre back in the 1920s. There were even imprints dedicated solely to Regency romances. I called The Ladies Road Guide to Utter Ruin a Regency romance/crime novel, but really it’s not much different to Heyer’s “adventure” novels. What has changed since the days of Harlequin and Signet and Zebra, with their garish covers, is the presence of social commentary – although I seem to remember Fiona Hill’s Regency romances from the late 1970s and early 1980s included it. But Goodman’s series not only features social commentary, but also social justice – and it’s from a present-day perspective. Which only makes the books more likeable. I mean, I do like me some Heyer, but some of the baked-in sensibilities in her books are hard-to-take: the unexamined privilege, old men marrying teenage girls, the blindness to social inequality, the demonisation of the poor… 

Heyer did have the wit, of course, and the charm, and there she reigns supreme. Goodman’s first-person narrative is not so light, but it does cover weightier topics, and in her favour she makes excellent use of a number of real historical figures. These are fun, but also a little more meaningful than most novels of their type. Recommended.