Christine Sparks

A features writer on a British women's magazine spent thirteen years interviewing famous men, Warren Beatty and Charlton Heston and Roger Moore among them, and then decided it was now or never. Christine Sparks wrote a novel, sold it to Silhouette, wrote a second one set in Venice, and published that in 1984 under the name Lucy Gordon. Then she quit the magazine.

The Venice detail is not incidental. On holiday there she had met a Venetian artist who proposed on the second day, and they married three months later, which is both a plot she could have sold to her own publisher and the reason so much of the work is set in Italy. Under the Lucy Gordon name she has written more than seventy-five romances for Silhouette and Mills and Boon, and has twice won the Romance Writers of America RITA Award.

What the credits show is a career built inside the category romance, which is a specific discipline rather than a lesser one: fixed length, fixed emotional arc, a strong hook on the cover, and no room whatsoever for slack. The recurring hooks here are Italy, royalty and unexpected fatherhood, occasionally all three in the same book. Written to a tight schedule for a readership that knows exactly what it wants, they are consistent, warm and entirely unpretentious.