By anyone's standards, Nora Roberts is one of the world's top-selling authors of mass-market paperback fiction. She has published more than 135 books in twenty-five languages since 1981; what's more, Roberts has seen a whopping 112 million copies of her books in print. According to her publisher, a reader somewhere in the United States buys a Nora Roberts novel every four minutes of every day.

This versatile and prolific writer has helped to transform the romance genre through her use of multiple narrators, humor, and strong, independent female protagonists. During the early years of her career, Roberts devoted her energies exclusively to creating paperback romances for the mass market. However, in recent years she has also started writing more complex, polished mainstream fiction, adapting some of the same techniques and themes that have served her so well earlier in her career.

Known as one of the fastest workers in the trade...