Below is the complete list of Knockemout books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series by Lucy Score.
Knockemout Series
- Things We Never Got Over (2022)
- Things We Hide from the Light (2023)
- Things We Left Behind (2023)
About Knockemout Series
Lucy Score’s Knockemout series is one of those romance lines that feels bigger than its book count because the town is so vivid and the cast is so tightly connected. On the surface, these are contemporary small-town romances, each centered on a different couple. In practice, they read like a shared-world trilogy built on overlapping lives, family tension, unresolved history, and a town full of people who are impossible to ignore. That is why publication order matters. Each book delivers its own complete romance, but the emotional payoff is stronger when the series is read straight through.
The first book, Things We Never Got Over, does the hardest work of the trilogy because it has to establish Knockemout itself. The town is not a soft, idealized small-town fantasy where everyone is sweet and quirky in harmless ways. It is rough-edged, loud, meddling, loyal, and often chaotic. That texture is a big part of the series’ appeal. Lucy Score gives the town personality without making it feel artificial, and once that setting is in place, the later books benefit from the reader already understanding its rhythms and its people. Knockemout becomes part of the romantic engine, not just the backdrop.
Another reason the books reward publication order is the male friendship at the center of the series. Knox, Nash, and Lucian are not just three interchangeable heroes waiting for their turn. Their history with one another shapes the whole trilogy. Each book reveals a different side of that bond, and the shift in perspective from one brother or friend to the next is one of the series’ pleasures. By the time the final book arrives, the reader is not only invested in the central couple, but in the whole emotional network surrounding them.
That emotional network is what keeps the trilogy from feeling repetitive. Lucy Score is clearly working in a familiar contemporary-romance lane—witty banter, heavy attraction, bruised heroes, strong heroines—but each book presses on different vulnerabilities. One leans more into caretaking and unexpected responsibility, another into healing and safety, another into long history and buried feeling. The men may all project confidence and control in different ways, but the real pattern of the trilogy is watching each one lose the ability to stay detached. That gives the books continuity without flattening them into copies of one another.
The tone is also important. Knockemout books are romantic and funny, but they are not weightless. The characters are carrying real damage: family wounds, professional pressure, past disappointments, and the kinds of emotional scars that make intimacy harder than attraction. Lucy Score uses humor well, especially through dialogue and town interference, but the series works because the jokes sit on top of genuine feeling. The romances do not depend only on chemistry. They depend on whether these people can actually trust one another enough to build something lasting.
The trilogy also benefits from scale. Three books is enough to make the town feel lived in and the recurring cast meaningful, but not so many that the series begins to sprawl. By the final installment, there is a satisfying sense that the world has filled out naturally. Familiar side characters gain more weight, earlier events echo into later books, and the whole series feels like a complete visit to one particular corner of Lucy Score’s fictional world.
For readers who already have the list above, the best way to think about Knockemout is as a linked small-town romance trilogy built around one town, one connected male core, and three emotionally substantial love stories. Read in publication order, the books offer more than three separate romances. They create the full experience of Knockemout: messy, loyal, funny, wounded, and ultimately the kind of place where people who thought they were too damaged or too set in their ways discover they may still get a future they never expected.