Sourcebooks Casablanca Romance Authors

It started with a snake. Or rather, a photo of a snake, posted by a Facebook friend—a photo of a large (6-7 foot) black rat snake that apparently found its way into her shed.   Responses to said photo ranged from “Eek!”, “Ewww!”, and “Yikes!” to the ever-popular “Why did it have to be snakes?” This is a reaction with which I completely sympathize, no doubt stemming from my early exposure to far too many National Geographic specials featuring poisonous snakes. And Rudyard Kipling’s classic story, “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi,” brilliantly adapted by Chuck Jones into an animated 1975 short.   The mated cobras Nag and Nagaina would give anyone nightmares. My personal interactions with snakes have been brief, harmless, and infrequent thus far, which I fervently hope will continue to be the case. However, that didn’t stop me from a near freak-out some years ago when I almost stepped on one, which was lying across a footpath and doing its best impression of a broken twig. My sandal...

Cloak billowing in the wind, tricorne hat perched proudly on his head, he galloped across my television screen and changed my life forever. Hyperbole? Not by much. Robin Ellis as Ross Poldark One summer, our local PBS station broadcast the 1970s miniseries Poldark-- about the changing fortunes of an ancient Cornish mining family--and its sequel back-to-back. Almost 30 weeks of high drama, smoldering romance, and swashbuckling adventure, unfolding against the wild, beautiful landscape of 18 th century Cornwall. The lavish production was lovingly written—despite some dramatic liberties taken early in the series—and wonderfully cast, with a brooding Robin Ellis as the title character (a soldier who returns to a ruined estate and a sweetheart now engaged to his cousin instead), and a fiery Angharad Rees as Demelza, one of the main women in Poldark’s life. Other standouts included Ralph Bates, as Poldark’s smarmy parvenu nemesis, George Warleggan, and Richard Morant a...

  Hello, again! I’m delighted to be back to celebrate the official launch of Waltz with a Stranger this week! When I hear the word “launch,” I think of rockets awaiting the countdown that will blast them into outer space, or majestic ocean liners setting out for the open sea. In which case I can only hope that my book proves to be more like the Queen Mary than the Titanic! Apropos of which . . . between the 1870s and the 1910s, posh ocean liners like the Queen Mary ferried rich, ambitious, confident American heiresses--many of them snubbed by hidebound, old-money society at home--across the Atlantic in search of titled husbands in England and Europe.    One of the more famous buccaneers, Consuelo Vanderbilt, the duke she bagged (the 9 th Duke of Marlborough), their heir, John, and their spare, Ivor. Painted by John Singer-Sargent. In Waltz with a Stranger , New York shipping heiresses Amy and Aurelia Newbold are among the latest wave of “...

Hello, everyone! Greetings from one of the new kids on the block. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some of you last summer at the RWA Conference in Anaheim, and I hope to meet the rest of you too, once I settle in. Beth suggested I write a “Five Things You Don’t Know About Me” blog, which seems as good a way as any to start things off, so here goes: 1.   You might guess this one from my photo: I am a third-generation Chinese-American. My father grew up in a traditional Chinese family, my mother in a non-Chinese family with traditions of its own. They relocated to Southern California from New York before I was born, so I consider myself a native Californian and thoroughly assimilated, though I value my Asian heritage. 2. I have a retentive but strangely selective memory. Seriously. I remember snatches of poems I learned as a child, lyrics to obscure or novelty songs, equally obscure trivia or historical facts, and the times tables--but I tend to forget things like ...