The Company of Rogues
A group of boys band together at Harrow for protection and never quite stop. Twenty years later one of them needs help with something involving the Crown, and he sends for the others.
The premise
A school alliance that outlived school
The Company of Rogues began as a defensive arrangement between boys at Harrow, formed under Nicholas Delaney because a group is harder to bully than an individual. That is a good deal more grounded than most Regency series get about why a set of men would be permanently loyal to each other.
It becomes a plot engine in the first book, when Nicholas, in the middle of serving the Crown by seducing information out of a French spy, has to marry Eleanor Chivenham for reasons of family honor and reassembles the Rogues to help. From then on each novel takes one Rogue, or someone close to one, and the rest of the group provides backup, opinions and interference.
The books
The seven on this shelf
The series runs longer than these seven; the shelf holds the first five in sequence plus two of the later entries. To Rescue a Rogue in particular is often named as the emotional high point of the whole run, and it lands harder if the earlier books are read first.
Elsewhere
The Mallorens are a different series
Two more Jo Beverley books on this shelf, The Secret Duke and An Unlikely Countess, are not Rogues books. They belong to the Malloren series, set in the Georgian period rather than the Regency, around the Marquess of Rothgar and his siblings. Different decade, different family, different register, noted here because the two runs are easy to confuse on a shelf listing.
Coverage
Where this sits
Nine Jo Beverley books on the shelf: seven Rogues and two Mallorens.
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.