5 Gail Carriger Book Series That Go Beyond The Parasol Protectorate

The series that started it all, The Parasol Protectorate cemented Carriger’s reputation as a steampunk author. Set in an alternate Victorian England, the five-book series revolves around Alexia Tarabotti, who has three identifying traits. She’s a spinster. She wields her parasol with deadly accuracy. And she has no soul. Literally. Oh, and she also has the ability to take away other people’s powers with a touch. 

When she’s attacked by a starving vampire—and dispatches him quite efficiently with her parasol—she draws the attention of the werewolf Lord Maccon, who has been sent by Queen Victoria to investigate. What follows is a comedy of manners, romance, and a healthy dose of mystery.  Never taking itself too seriously, the final novel, Timeless, even involves a family trip to Egypt!

After the success of the Parasol Protectorate, Carriger launched a new series set in the same universe. Set before her first series, The Finishing School novels even feature a few characters from her earlier books, albeit much younger. As the series title implies, the books take place in a finishing school. But it’s not just any old regular finishing school, as our heroine Sophronia Temminnick soon discovers. 

Shaping up to be a poor semblance of a proper lady, Sophronia's despairing mother enrolls her daughter in Mademoiselle Geraldine's Finishing Academy for Young Ladies of Quality. Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? Here, young ladies learn everything proper society expects them to: dance, etiquette, and dress. But they also learn a few other things too. Like murder and espionage. Guess Sophronia’s dead mother didn’t investigate the school’s pedigree as much as she should have. 

In the second book, Curtsies and Conspiracies, the finishing school—which is actually a flying dirigible—takes a field trip to London. Sophronia begins to suspect there’s another hidden motive for the field trip. A conspiracy, if you will. Now, she must uncover the details while maintaining the façade of a young lady enjoying the London Season without arousing suspicion.

A trio of novellas, Delightfully Deadly picks up where The Finishing School series left off—except here, Sophronia’s classmates are all grown up. Now adults, Preshea, Dimity, and Agatha work as England’s best agents. For example, Preshea is a highly effective assassin, although it’s masked as her being a black widow, a woman whose husbands somehow all end up dead. Sure, it leaves her with a terrible reputation, but it’s that of an opportunistic woman, not a hired killer. On the other end of the spectrum, we have Agatha, who is London’s best spy, simply because she goes unnoticed. 

In Defy or Defend, the middle installment of the trilogy, we have Dimity, a spy who never really wanted to become one but is nevertheless quite talented at it. Her latest mission involves preventing a vampire hive from descending into madness due to the disappearance of their queen. Accompanying her is Sir Crispin, a former war hero turned spy, who’s charged with protecting Dimity. Their deepening relationship is one of the best elements of the book.

Carriger further expanded her Parasolverse with The Custard Protocol, which features Alexia’s daughter, Prudence. When we last saw Rue in the original Parasol Protectorate novels, she was a toddler. Now an adult, she’s about to follow in her mother’s footsteps. When she’s given a flying dirigible, Rue is tasked to travel to India and investigate a certain tea plant. Given the time period, however, we can guess the type of colonialist problems that await her. 

While The Custard Protocol details the exploits of a crew of misfits aboard a dirigible—think Firefly in Victorian England—the first two books Prudence and Imprudence focus on Rue, who is singular in the Parasolverse, being the daughter of a werewolf and a soulless human.

If you want something less Victorian and less steampunk-flavored, then give her San Andreas Shifters series a try. A series of queer urban fantasy novels, the books are structured like a traditional romance series, with each book featuring a new couple and exploring their relationship. As the name implies, the series is filled with shapeshifters: werewolves, werefoxes, even wereotters! 

The Omega Objection, the second book in the series, takes an old school approach to alpha and omega dynamics in werewolf packs versus the omegaverse structure that’s more prevalent today. Tank is a werewolf working as a bouncer at a bar. Isaac is the bartender at said bar and, mysteriously, he has no scent. But even more telling, Isaac is skittish around werewolves, which makes Tank’s presence tricky. What makes their romance interesting is that their relationship dynamic isn’t what you’d expect at first.