Debbie Macomber

The small American town, in Debbie Macomber's hands, is not a setting but a machine. A knitting shop, a harbour, a bed and breakfast, a street with numbered houses, and enough recurring residents that a reader who finishes one book has already met the cast of the next four. That is the commercial insight the whole career rests on, and it works: six of her novels have been made into television movies, and the Cedar Cove books became a television series of their own.

The romance is real but it is rarely the load-bearing wall. What she is unusually good at is the second and third storyline, the widowed neighbour, the grown daughter's job, the business about to fold. 44 Cranberry Point (Cedar Cove, Book 4) is Cedar Cove doing exactly that, an ensemble held together by an address. Starting Now (Blossom Street #9) runs the same structure through the Blossom Street knitting-shop books, and The inn at Rose Harbor starts a third town from nothing.

Before the town books came a long run of category romance, which is where the craft was built: Navy Wife (The Navy Series #1), The sheriff takes a wife, Country Bride, Brides for Brothers, written fast and to length. The Manning sisters collects a pair of them. She was the inaugural winner of the fan-voted Quill Award for romance in 2005, and holds both a RITA and a lifetime achievement award from the Romance Writers of America. The Christmas books, Mrs. Miracle among them, are an annual industry in their own right.