The London Season – famous in fiction (and still happens today, amazingly!) – was the ideal marriage market for the Regency Miss. With Parliament in session from mid-fall to early summer, the court and the gentry alike left their country estates to flock to the capital. By day some made laws, by night all made hay at a glittering round of parties, concerts and balls. Eager mamas thronged the best venues, hunting a good catch for their daughters. Romance flowered, and not just for debutantes. Marriage could be little more than a property deal, so for married women flirtation spiced up a life of sheltered respectability. Naturally all had to be hidden. A whiff of scandal could ruin even the most powerful, but women, with so few rights, suffered most. Saffina’s passionate romance with the mighty Earl of Endale, her rakish guardian, travelled a rocky road. They quickly become lovers, sharing his taste for erotic discipline. In SAFFINA’S SEASON they’re now settled and married but Lord Endale treats his new Countess to her long-promised London Season with mixed feelings. He knows her beauty and wit will make her a star, but his reputation is checkered. Worse, he dreads a rival…

Baseball has always been a sport I’ve loved. I grew up collecting baseball cards, watching the Boston Red Sox whenever a game was on TV, and playing with the boys in the schoolyard. And still after many, many years, the love of the game is still embedded me. So much so, that my home office is riddled with pictures and memorabilia of the game. My inspiration for DARE TO KISS goes a bit deeper. As a little girl I fought hard to play baseball on a boys’ city league. But back in the late sixties and early seventies, girls weren’t allowed to play on boys’ team. It was then I came up with the plot for DARE TO KISS on how a high school girl breaks through barriers to play on an all boys’ baseball team. It didn’t take me long once I started writing. The protagonist, Lacey Robinson is a girl, who is a lot like myself. She loves the energy of the ball field. She loves hearing the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd. She loves striking a batter out, but most of all she loves the game, and no matter the consequences, and…

In addition to my love for romantic suspense, I have a fondness for non-fiction. Really, truth can be stranger than fiction. I think research is fun, but more importantly, I wanted my story to feel as real as possible. SURRENDER AT THE BORDER takes place mostly in Cuidad Juarez, Mexico, and my research led to some fascinating and scary things that really exist. Here are six things about SURRENDER AT THE BORDER that are real: The Feds vs. the Librarians. Surrender opens with B.J., an ATF agent, investigating a case by getting information from library computers. This is in opposition of everything Callie, the head librarian, believes in. This conflict comes directly from my own days as a librarian. Even before the Patriot Act, law enforcement officials targeted the reading habits of people who were, for one reason or another, suspicious. Librarians saw this as a violation of every citizen’s constitutionally protected right to privacy and developed policies and procedures to handle just this kind of situation. So if you see a television program where a cop goes up to a librarian and asks what so-and-so has been reading, a real librarian would refuse or at least make a fuss….

The adage that life is a juggling act is a cliché for a reason. It’s true. It’s so stupendously true that it’s a joke. I mean, seriously, is there anyone out there who is actually on top of said ball, at least without the stupid thing periodically rolling out from under them and putting them on their butts? (Exercise balls, I’m looking at you.) The truth is, we juggle. And my juggling goes something like this. Monday: I have all week to do all the things. I make a schedule…on a spreadsheet. Writing, homeschooling, meal prep, housework…it’s all neatly partitioned by day and allotted with help from the weather forecast. Beautiful day? The kids will spend it outside, so that is when I’ll write all the words. I’ll get ahead, I will! Cold rainy day? Homemade soup it is! I got this. Tuesday: I spent Monday making that pretty spreadsheet. I’m behind, a little, but all is not lost. Only the kids can smell “flustered” like they can smell burgers grilling, so suddenly I’m the most popular person in the world. Even my teenagers won’t stop talking to me. This feels like one of those awesome parenting wins, so I…

A run-down motel in a small town isn’t the most likely place for a romance novel to begin. But the moment I saw it, I knew it was the perfect starting point for GETTING IT BACK, the third book in my Red Hot Russians series. One thing I love about being a writer is that thunderclap of inspiration, when vague ideas suddenly crystalize into characters, scenes and conflicts. In the spring of 2014, ideas had been turning in my head for weeks. I knew GETTING IT BACK’s hero was Misha, an Olympic champion skater whose post-skating life hadn’t gone as planned. But I didn’t know much else. A road trip, on a dark and stormy day—on my way to a wake, no less—provided the answer. A detour took me off the interstate onto a two lane highway running through Midwestern farm country. The weather was ominous—dark, low hanging clouds that can spawn thunderstorms and even tornadoes. Listening to static-y country music on the radio, I drove into a small town, and passed an old motel. Its sign was lit and glowed against the gloomy sky. An empty swimming pool was surrounded by a fence and looked like it hadn’t been…

This may be the one and only time our name are ever mentioned in a New York Times article ! Now isn’t this just too cool? And it’s for such a great cause: helping our vets. The three of us couldn’t be prouder. Plus, Laura Holson, the reporter who wrote the piece, was VERY kind in putting up the info on the charity. She didn’t have to do that—but bless her, too. Read down to the part about the making of a cover and find Chris Keniston and myself, Lindsay McKenna — we worked jointly on the cover. Susan Stoker, in the meantime, was on an ocean cruise, unavailable, so the task fell to us to create it without her valuable input. We chose Jason Baca as our model. Tammy Seidick of TammySeidickDesigns.com, took our direction and did a fabulous job. We made a good team. Chris should be lauded for making the cover what it looks like in the final presentation — I just put in ideas, suggestions here and there ;-). We almost forgot to put the dog tags on Jason—that was my biggest add to the cover, haha. We all think it’s a great cover! Fingers crossed…

I’ve always dreamed of traveling to New York City. Ever since I set my Historical Romances there—Edge of Freedom Series (Bethany House Publishers)—I’ve imagined what it must have been like to walk the streets a hundred years ago, to see the ships sail into the harbor and witness the eager faces of the people as they stepped into America from Ellis Island. Alas, life intervened, and the trip I’d thought to take was pushed to the back burner. The desire to travel to the places I wrote about stayed with me, however, which is why I was so excited when my husband offered me the chance of a lifetime…the chance to choose where I wanted to go on vacation. Anywhere. Just the two of us. A second honeymoon, of sorts. While I appreciated the offer, I really couldn’t believe that my hubby was going to let me choose our destination with entirely no input from him. “I get to pick?” I asked, a trifle skeptically. “Anywhere at all?” “Absolutely,” he said. “Anywhere you want to go.” With a broad spectrum of places to choose from spread out before me, I found I didn’t even hesitate. I knew where I wanted…

THE HOUSE BY THE LAKE is an incredibly special book to me. It was inspired by three things: a trip that I took to Berlin, a true story about an old palace in the former East Germany and another true story about a woman who abandoned her apartment in Paris in 1940 on the eve of the Nazi invasion, leaving an un-spoilt treasure trove which was only re-discovered when she died in 2010. All of these things left me asking questions- and with a real desire to not only find out more, but to get to some sort of truth and understanding about the past- and in order to do that, I wanted to delve beyond the facts. So- I wrote a novel. But first, what were the facts that I had? Let’s start with Paris. In 2010, an apartment was re-discovered in the ninth arrondissement that had been abandoned for seventy years after the owner- a ‘Madame de Florian’- fled on the eve of the Nazi invasion. There is nothing unusual about the fact that the woman never returned to Paris, but what was extraordinary, was the fact that Madame de Florian left her apartment exactly as it was…

Although every female booklover can’t wait to read about the hero, whether a handsome cowboy with a soft spot for orphans, a rakish marquis who needs an heir, or a sophisticated jewel thief who donates his loot to charity, it’s the heroines that stick with readers. Here are the 5 characteristics for heroines that readers will sometimes love/sometimes hate, but will always remember long after they give the book to their mother-in-law. Heroines must be flawed. No one liked the girl in high school with perfect hair/clothes/teeth/car/parents…fill in the blank. Unless she happened to be us, that girl was annoying. Make sure heroines have plenty of nice attributes, but there also must be things for her to work on. My heroine in WHAT HAPPENED ON BEALE STREET hates people in her “personal space.” Beth Kirby often balks or runs in the opposite direction if people get too close. Heroines recognize their flaws and strive to overcome them. Just like we don’t like perfection, we also don’t like women who keep making the same mistake over and over. Consider the famous anti-heroine Scarlett O’Hara in GONE WITH THE WIND. Although Margaret Mitchel gave us plenty of reasons to hate her, no…

How does a poet become a fantasy author? It’s an interesting question and one of the few our reviewer Katherine Petersen asked fantasy author Helen Lowe. Maybe it’s the New Zealand landscape? Or her childhood around the Pacific Rim cities? Why not join us as we find out. You started off as a poet, and it really reflects in your writing. How do you see your poetry background affects your storytelling? Helen: Your question is a really interesting one, because it’s made me realise that poetry does always come first for me. By which I mean that my very first scribblings as a child were poetry and every time I have a sabbatical from writing, it is always poetry that I start writing again first. Possibly this is simply because I find it so much easier to complete a poem within the initial creative burst, whereas most short fiction (with the probable exception of flash) and certainly novels, have to be sustained beyond that – well beyond in the case of novels! Poetry and prose are not separate worlds, though, but neighbouring countries, where border crossings are made by way of the rhythm and flow and richness of language, and…