Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

Hi everyone!  Julie Ann Walker here, delighted to be talking today about my mad love for men on motorcycles whose hearts happen to be as big as their... ehem... hogs.  (That's slang for their bikes!  Get your heads out of the gutter, you naughty readers! *wink, wink*)  But seriously, from the King of Cool, Steve McQueen, to Marlon Brando in The Wild One , to Charlie Hunnam in Sons of Anarchy , there has always been something about a guy riding around with rolled steel and a V-Twin engine between his legs.  It sets our hearts aflutter.  And in my Black Knights Inc. series, I try to take those badass bikers to a whole new level by also making them covert government operators.  The series is all spies on bikes, leather and chrome, romance and redemption, action and adventure.  So, what's not to love?  Nothing!  I guarantee it.  Read on for an excerpt of TOO HARD TO HANDLE.   You'll see the men of Black Knights Inc. ha...

Steady Hands, Cool Head... Carlos "Steady" Soto's nerves of steel have served him well at the covert government defense firm Black Knights Inc. But nothing has prepared him for the emotional roller coaster of guarding the woman he once loved and lost. Will All He's Got Be Enough? Abby Thomson is content to leave politics and international intrigue to her father—the President of the United States—until she's taken hostage half a world away, and she fears her father's policy of not negotiating with terrorists will be her death sentence. There's one glimmer of hope: the man whose heart she broke, but she can ever tell him why... As they race through the jungle in a bid for safety, the heat simmering between Steady and Abby could be a second chance for them—if they make it out alive. An Excerpt When Carlos looked over at Abby standing in the middle of them, her skin dewed with sweat and her pale green eyes bright with enthusiasm, all his laughter d...

by Julie Ann Walker My husband and I have had the conversation many times about the difference between attractiveness and beauty.  A person can have charisma, sex-appeal, that certain je ne sais quois that makes them exceedingly yummy even though, from a strictly aesthetic perspective, they aren't all that, well, pretty .  Yet, because of all the aforementioned things, they are still exceedingly "attractive."  And then there are folks whose physical features are pure perfection.  Their faces carved in such flawless proportions that looking at them almost hurts, like gazing into a setting sun without the benefit of UV-blocking sunglasses.  You know, the "beautiful" ones. The other day, Mr. Walker and I were making a list of "attractive" actresses.  Women whose particular brand of va-va-voom overcomes any flaws in their appearance.  This morning I decided to go the other route and share with you my top ten list of actors who I think are absolutel...

by Julie Ann Walker Authors build worlds... Sounds quite grand, doesn't it?  And in a way, it is.  Because no matter the genre, be it historical, paranormal, contemporary, whatever, when an author sits down to put a story on paper, a world gets created.  A world that starts in the author's mind and ends in the reader's.  And really great authors give us worlds rich with detail, dripping with delicious tidbits, rife with the fascinating minutia that makes their world, that specific world, just that much more compelling. Now I don't claim to be a great author.  But I am striving every gosh-darned day to become one.  The problem?  I hate research.  (It's too much like studying, which I tended to avoid like the Bubonic Plague, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and a brain-eating mob of zombies all rolled into one.)  So the question becomes, if I can't sit in front of my PC doing hours of investigation - and, by the way, I totally salute ...