Lucy Score Books

Lucy Score is a Pennsylvania author with a journalism degree who spent the 2010s quietly self-publishing her way to one of the most loyal readerships in romance. Long before the world caught on, she was turning out small-town romantic comedies in her Blue Moon series, psychic murder mysteries with kissing in the Riley Thorn books, and standalones like By a Thread, an office romance with a grumpy boss that still does numbers on TikTok every year. She wrote fast, published constantly, and built her audience one funny, oversized book at a time. Then one book changed the scale of everything.

Things We Never Got Over, published in January 2022, is the story of Naomi, a runaway bride who arrives in Knockemout, Virginia to bail out her chaotic twin sister and ends up stranded with custody of a niece she has never met and no money. The town's resident bearded grump, Knox Morgan, wants nothing to do with any of it, which naturally means he is doomed. BookTok adopted the book with missionary zeal, it parked itself on the bestseller lists for years, and Bloom Books brought her to print in a huge way. Two sequels completed the Knockemout trilogy: Things We Hide From the Light (2023), pairing chief of police Nash with Lina, who works in insurance the way a shark works as a lifeguard, and Things We Left Behind (2023), giving icy Lucian and librarian Sloane one of the best enemies-to-lovers arcs in small-town romance.

Her newest project is Story Lake, launched with Story of My Life in March 2025: a rom-com author who no longer believes in happily ever afters buys a house, and a town council seat, in a dying Pennsylvania lake town. The pitch was Gilmore Girls meets Schitt's Creek, which is accurate. The second book, Mistakes Were Made, follows in March 2026. She remains prolific in a way that borders on alarming, with a backlist deep enough to carry a reader through an entire winter.

What defines a Lucy Score book is the grumpy-sunshine dynamic perfected, an entire town of interfering secondary characters who feel like recurring sitcom cast, and banter that is genuinely, laugh-in-public funny. Her heroines rebuild their lives on the page, her heroes are protective without being suffocating, and the emotional wounds underneath are treated sincerely without ever letting the book turn grim. On heat she runs a solid 3 on our 0 to 5 scale: open door, enthusiastic, well spaced through the book rather than front-loaded.

Honest criticism: the books are too long, and it is not close. Five hundred plus pages is standard, subplots sprawl, and the third acts have a habit of importing a danger plot the romance never needed. Read two in a row and the beats rhyme. None of this appears to bother her readers in the slightest, because nobody picks up a Lucy Score novel for economy. You pick one up because it feels like staying an extra week somewhere nice, with people whose problems will work out.

Why she is on this shelf: the same reason a spa day exists. Between two five-hundred-page fae wars with battle casualties, a Knockemout book is where romantasy readers go to recover, and the crossover readership is enormous. Where to start: Things We Never Got Over, which remains her best and the correct entry point. Try By a Thread if you want office romance, Riley Thorn if you want ghosts and grandmas with your kissing, and Story of My Life if you would rather get in on a series while it is still young. Wherever you enter, budget more evenings than you planned, because the town always talks you into staying.