S05.21: That's So (Derek) Craven

Fated Mates - A Romance Novel Podcast

It’s Derek Craven Day 2023—empirically the best romance holiday of February—and we’re celebrating in traditional fashion by talking about why there are two types of Lisa Kleypas readers: The ones who think Derek Craven is the best hero, and the ones who are wrong.

If you’ve been with us for any length of time at all, you know we are mildly obsessed with Lisa Kleypas’s heroes, her writing, the way she writes objects into her books as talismans of emotion, and the way she injects excellent romance directly into our veins every single time.

This year, to celebrate this most high holy of romance days, we asked all of you to help us by filling up a Google spreadsheet with things other Kleypas heroes do in their books…because while St. Vincent and Winterborne will never get a holiday all to themselves, they’re pretty great dudes. Enjoy, friends. It’s -11 degrees on the East Coast, so we give you permission to hang out in bed all day and read a book by Lisa Kleypas.

Our first read along of 2023 (in February) is Tracy MacNish’s Stealing Midnight—we’ve heard the calls from our gothic romance readers and we’re delivering with this truly bananas story, in which the hero is dug out of a grave and delivered, barely alive, to the heroine. Get ready. You can find Stealing Midnight (for $1.99!) at Amazon, B&N, Kobo, or Apple Books.