The Cynsters
Six cousins the ton calls the Bar Cynster, on the understanding that every one of them will eventually be brought down by exactly the thing he is most certain he does not want.
The premise
Six cousins and a running joke
The Cynsters are a large, wealthy, thoroughly intimidating family, and the six unmarried male cousins of the current generation are known collectively as the Bar Cynster. Society uses the name with a certain amount of fear. They use it with enormous self-satisfaction.
The structure is the oldest one in the genre and this series commits to it completely: six men who have decided marriage is for other people, taken down one per book, in order, by women who were not remotely intimidated. Devil, the head of the family and Duke of St Ives, goes first, which sets the terms. If he can be caught, nobody is safe.
The books
The Bar Cynster, in order
Book 6, All About Love (2001), Lucifer’s book, closes the Bar Cynster and is the one gap in this run. It is the natural next purchase, since finishing the six is the point of reading them in order.
After the six
The series keeps going, and going
This is the thing to understand before starting: the Bar Cynster is six books, and the Cynster series is far larger. Laurens kept writing into the extended family and its social circle for well over a decade, and there are also distinct sub-runs.
The Cynster Sisters Trilogy
All three are on this shelf: Viscount Breckenridge to the Rescue, In Pursuit of Eliza Cynster and The Capture of the Earl of Glencrae. A single kidnapping plot carried across three books, which is unusual for the genre and reads much better consecutively.
The Cynster Sisters Duo
The Taming of Ryder Cavanaugh is here, the second of the pair.
Stephanie Laurens is the second most represented author on this shelf with eighteen titles, and they span the Cynsters, the Bastion Club, the Casebook of Barnaby Adair and several standalone novellas. The Cynster material alone runs to ten of those.
Coverage
Where this sits
Five of the six Bar Cynster novels, the prequel, the complete Cynster Sisters Trilogy and one of the Duo. Only All About Love is missing from the core run.
See the whole Library → · Stephanie Laurens has 18 titles on this shelf →
Cover images are the publishers’ official covers, used to identify the editions discussed. No part of these novels has been read directly for this page.