Beautiful is the fifth and final novel in Christina Lauren's Beautiful Bastard series, published by Gallery Books on 4 October 2016. It closes the run by handing the last love story to two characters the earlier books had already introduced: Pippa Bay Cox, a free-spirited Englishwoman, and Jensen Bergstrom, Hanna's older brother.
After discovering her boyfriend has been unfaithful, Pippa leaves London to clear her head in the United States and joins friends on a two-week wine tour along the East Coast. Jensen, a work-consumed lawyer talked into the trip by his sister, finds himself sharing it with the woman he had one memorably awkward encounter with on the flight over. Meticulous and self-contained, he is steadily undone by Pippa's openhearted charm, and what both of them treat as a temporary holiday fling grows harder to hand back as the fortnight runs out — not least because their lives sit on opposite sides of an ocean.
The novel doubles as a reunion. The tour gathers the whole cast of the series, alternating between Pippa's and Jensen's points of view before closing with epilogues that check in on every couple that came before. It is adult contemporary romance in the explicit, comic register the series is known for.