Exciting news! The final book in the Canyon Club series— Jack Ryker’s story, Saturday Santa—comes out this October.
The Canyon Series takes readers to the beach towns south of L.A. where three graduates of an uber-privileged boy's school meet again as their tenth high school reunion approaches. It’s a fun fact, that if you search the web for “bad headmasters,” you’ll find murderers, adulterers, and embezzlers. Private schools and scandal go together like burgers and fries, so I didn’t have to go far to research the wrongdoing of Headmaster Chambers at fictional Canyon, a world that has striking similarities to Austen’s Regency England.
I like “unlikely attractions,” so I try to make my heroes the “least” eligible bachelors in London. Maybe they are illegitimate or in disgrace; almost always they are fallen and in need of redemption. For this series some research and lots of playing “what if” led me to a group of fallen aristocrats, who agree to act as spies for the British Foreign Office in its campaign against Russia in exchange for having their debts paid. No spy acts alone, but finds a partner in an independent young woman facing the imperative to marry with spirit and sense and a copy of The Husband Hunter’s Guide to London. A great deal of the fun of writing the series was channeling my inner “Jane Austen” to write the fictional guide that opens each chapter.
The “Sons of Sin” trilogy tells the story of three brothers, whose mother is an infamous London courtesan. Bound by their tainted birth and the kidnapping of the youngest in 1816, Xander, Will, and Kit Jones stand poised between London’s dark, labyrinthine underworld and its gleaming future. Each has a story interwoven with the rise of modern London.
Two historical romances and one traditional Regency focus on the return to England of veterans of the Napoleonic Wars. The theme is coming to terms with the sharp contrast between the turbulence and barbarity war and the comforts of drawing rooms and country estates. Of course, my heroes need the help of a woman’s love.
Take a beach stay-cation in the pages of a book.
The English Regency is the perfect historical moment for a marriage-plot novel. The Regency heroine has no “Plan B” if she fails to make a good match, so the stakes are high. All the elements that can divide a hero and heroine—birth, social standing, wealth, temperament, unspoken laws and customs—exist to be overcome, yet external constraints have not yet made women incapable of judging others and standing up for themselves.
