Back in the mid-to-late nineties I picked ordered an Anita Blake omnibus from the Sci-Fi Book Club, and my teenage heart became hooked on paranormal romance.
I hope you're gleaning two things from that sentence: 1. my approximate age and 2. the fact that as a teenager I belonged to the Sci-Fi Book Club. I was beating those boys off with a stick, I was.
Anyway, Anita Blake represented this whole new genre I hadn't even thought of: sexy vampires. I was a teen, and therefore emo, and I adored the brooding, forbidden nature of the attraction between Anita and Jean Claude. I bought every book in the series and devoured them. I read them even when Richard, the werewolf, showed up to fuck things up and cry. While waiting for the next book I searched desperately for something else like Anita.
Now, this was before paranormal romance was really a thing (or before I knew about it anyway). It was not the dominant romance subgenre. There was very little YA fiction I could find on the vampire + teenage girl love thing we now know so well. This was also back when I went to a physical bookstore to buy books, not to a website, and I was not yet comfortable enough asking the sales clerk, “Do you have any sexy brooding vampires in your warehouse? Preferably books with sex in them? Thanks.” I had to take what I could find.
I found Amanda Ashley. Oh, how I loved her. She wrote books about depressed, lurking vampires who were really good men at heart but were ashamed of their latent violence and pastiness. There were your traditional vampires, folks. They couldn't go out in daylight. They didn't fucking sparkle. They longed for the warm embrace of a sweet human woman. I read Embrace the Night, Deeper Than the Night and A Darker Dream so many times the covers split. Ashley also included poetry in her books, and what more could appeal to a teenage girl than vampire lustypants and poetry? It was a fucking home run.
I even read Sunlight Moonlight, a really strange duology. The Sunlight portion featured a girl falling in love with an alien. I never really recovered from that story or forgot it. There was a terrifyingly lantern-jawed Fabio on the cover, which I guess is what aliens look like. Maybe Fabio is an alien. It bears thinking on.
I found Christine Feehan and read the first few of her books – Dark Prince, Dark Desire, and Dark Gold.
I liked the books, but I didn't love them. I think my naive virgin self was a little traumatized by the Carpathians gigantic peens and their penchant for doggy-style sex. I was still struggling with the idea of tampons; a hero hung like a table-leg made me shudder in imagined pain.
(SB Sarah adds: I had no input in this entry and the fact that we were both weirded by the doggy-style Carpathians is completely coincidental.)
I also read a lot of L.J. Smith. Smith was the one author I found who gave me the YA vampire feels. She wrote the Vampire Diaries that the CW show is based on. She had a series of books called Nightworld that featured romances between various paranormals (vampires and witches mostly) and humans. They were too short, but otherwise delicious. Every book had that forbidden, star-crossed lovers theme I was looking for. Smith's protagonists are soulmates, connected in some mystical supernatural way by a figurative silver chord. They sometimes get a shock or jolt when they first touch, just like Feehan's characters can see color. I loved the idea of a normal teenage girl being secretly connected to something bigger, darker and more powerful than she realized. It was my yearning to be recognized in the big, scary adult world put on paper. With vampires. And kissing. Secret Vampire features a girl with terminal pancreatic cancer and her best-friend, the boy next door, WHO IS ALSO SECRETLY A VAMPIRE. Of course he is. Of course an immortal creature would totally fucking go to high school. Why not? And of course he makes her a vampire to save her.
Things were great. I read Anne Rice and completely whiffed on the homo-erotic tensions. I read anything even remotely related to vampires and werewolves and witches. I devoured this stuff. And then…it just kind of fizzled.
I never totally let go of paranormal. I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer like my life depended on it. I think that Buffy, a small blonde girl, taught me that, as a small blonde girl myself, it was okay to demand to sit at the grown up table despite other's preconceptions of you. Sometimes when I'm the youngest, smallest, only woman in the room I still think of Buffy and know that I've got this shit. But I no longer needed the tortured vampire love stories I craved before. Part of it was that I was no longer yearning to be part of that scary, secret adult world with all the sex and drugs and rock n' roll. I was being pushed there whether I liked it or not.
And the genre was changing too. I'm a traditionalist. I like my vampires to burst into ash in sunlight. All of a sudden there were books with incredibly complex rules and world building. There were vampire-were-panther-wicca hybrids. There were books about vampires who didn't drink blood and glittered. And my go-to girl, Anita Blake, changed too. Hamilton's books became all about exploring erotic fantasy and Anita justifying to herself why she needed to have a three-way with a vampire and a werewolf while another werewolf watched or something. It became ridiculous. I actually threw Incubus Dreams in the garbage when Anita female-ejaculated and Nathaniel reverently called her a “rainmaker.” I was down with the erotica, but not with erotica filled with navel gazing and prolonged explanations for what it was.
I gave up for awhile. Then I read Twilight. Twilight is my least favorite book ever. I hated it. I hated that Edward was an emotionally manipulative stalker. I hated that Bella fell down and cried for most of the book. I skimmed books two and three (because I so desperately wanted it to get better and some of my friends loved these books and I'm stupid like that), and I actually kind of liked four because it was fucking batshit insane. Vampire teeth c-sections. Crazy fast growing babies. Soul-bond-pairing with said babies. WTF. I think I can actually make a fairly good case for the Cullens being a cult and drawing Bella in. But that's a different post. If I had been ready to dive back into paranormals, Twilight killed it for me.
It's been a few years since we've talked, paranormals and I. But just recently I got a copy of Christine Feehan's Dark Wolf and it's got such a beautiful cover, and it's staring at me. It is taunting me, begging me to come back. It'll be better this time, baby. I won't sparkle or make rain, I promise. And Amanda Ashley has a new book out too. So I think we might try this again. We're just going to keep things casual. Stay tuned.
What about you? Were you a paranormal fan, too? Are you still? Which of the classic paranormals was your favorite?
I just can’t get into paranormal romances. I guess because I’m from the old Old School. You kill the vampire. You kill the werewolf. You kill the mummy (again). They are the enemies of mankind and virgins. You don’t take them to the prom, you KILL THEM.
I recently read the care and feeding of stray vampires by Molly Harper. I really liked that one, so I am going to keep reading the series. But, I go through phases with liking paranormal romance. Sometimes they become too unbelievable.
Yes! Yes! Yes! To this post and all the commenters.
I started reading epic fantasy and sci-fi way too young, and then devoured my mom’s Anne Rice novels in my teens. Buffy was my hero. Hell any girl who carries a sword is my hero. When Twilight came out I remember telling a friend I was going to have to take a decade long vampire break for the genre to calm down. …. But ….. I didn’t. Barely a year later I found a copy of Robin Mckinley’s Sunshine in the library and thought, “now there’s a book where vampires were scarey and unapologetic.” I had read Sunshine before when it first came out, but the reread was so much better (cathartic even). Since then I have been on an urban fantasy manhunt. It is so hard to find the combination of spunky narrative, real monsters and heroines with a little damn self confidence.
Right now I love:
Ilona Andrews
Nalini Singh
Jeaniene Frost
Also some one mentioned Tanya Huff’s Blood Books, which contain an ultra-rare-not-lopsided-love-triangle. Plus Blood Ties was even a tv show for a while.
Well I never did read Anita Blake or Kenyon or even Christine Feehan. I seem to lose interest after just one “bite”. I read the first Twilight, the first KKMoning Fever series but didn’t get sucked in like I should with the series. That being said I did consume the Kresley Cole books (until Demon King) and JR Ward and those Black Dagger Boys! I dont know if Kate Daniels counts but I sqee over every one of them. I never cared for the cutsie style vampire stories either (K. Macalister). Too many paranormal seem like ‘cut and paste’ writing anymore. That probably why I like Thea Harrison (mostly) and I adored the new KK Moning book Iced. One incredibly different older book I still reread Is “Sunshine” by Robin Mckinley which is exceptionally well done but for goodness sake don’t ask her about a sequel or she may blast you with her laser eyes (probably not). The saturation in this market has made it difficult to follow anymore.
May I just say—BEST POST EVER! 🙂
Yeah, I was in a torrid relationship with PNR as well. And I was on the Twilight-wagon as well (though, I may add, I picked Twilight up when it was fresh off the press, before the over-hype started, and though I devoured the rest of the series as the books came out, not to mention attending the midnight release for the first movie, I was the one in the group trying to explain to my other friends that really good vampire romances are out there and they don’t sparkle!).
But, sadly, in the last few years I’ve become picky with the PNRs I do read. At one point, 95% of the books I read in a year were PNR. Now it’s more like 2%. Still, I do love a good shifter, and any paranormal that is well done and brings something new and interesting to the table!
Enjoy,
TBQ
Like everyone else, Anita Blake turned me off with the incessant sex. And I love reading erotica! But if you can’t move a plot forward without a 30-page bangfest, you’re doing it wrong. (Though I admit that I got really excited and pre-ordered the upcoming Merry Gentry book because I HAVE NO SHAME.)
At one point, I really liked L. A. Banks’ Vampire Huntress novels, because it was a novelty to see a heroine who was a physical badass with a trusted group of friends and family around her who was also a POC! Imagine—paranormal beings find non-white women attractive! They (to me) were a really interesting sort of paranormal/urban fiction cross, and stand out among all the various paranormals I’ve read in the past ten years.
Lackey’s Tregarde books were amazing, but I’d consider them closer to urban fantasy as opposed to paranormal romance, as Diana and her partner were a thing, and there wasn’t a romantic HEA in each one.
It’s taken me a while, but now I’m really enjoying Kresley Cole’s IAD series—while yes, it’s various super-powered immortals getting their freak on with each other, it’s also friends and characters from old books and basic man/woman miscommunication stuff in between all the Magic Hoo-Ha and and apocalypses.
Karen Marie Moning’s Fever books are my current favorite paranormals, though I also could see them as urban fantasy, though they do slowly build to somewhat of a coupling up. It took me a couple tries to get through Iced, but now I’m VERY excited for the next book.
Ditto-everything that’s been said about Laurell Hamilton’s Anita AND Merry Gentry! Anne Rice excellent at first, but frustrated me with the “vampires can’t have sex” part. Mary Janice Davisson, lots of fun at first, got repetitive…likewise the Sookie books which I got bored with at book 4. My daughter insisted I read the Twilight books, and I tried to get through the first one. OMG, NO teenagers talk like that! I’m in high schools everyday as a sub!
Sidenote: when the girls asked me if I was going to the first Twilight movie, they rhapsodized to me about how hot the actor was playing Edward. My daughter only went to the movies to see the weres tear off their clothing and run around half-naked, flexing…that’s my girl!(Beams with motherly pride.) I asked the girls if it wouldn’t be really creepy if I went to the movies because I thought he was hot too…I have kids older than him! They agreed that was EW!
Then they told me how exciting it was to think of being stalked by someone who has to even watch you sleep all night. (?!?) I asked them how old he’s supposed to be and they said he’s pretending he’s 17 but he’s really about 100 years old. I asked them how old their grandfathers were…they usually said about 65-70. I asked them if they’d date their grandfather’s friends…double EW! Then why would they date someone old enough to be their great-grandfather? Imagine the “pillow talk”—Him: “Blah, blah, blah, the old days…” Her: “Are you still talking? I’m texting.”
And I agree that the trope of the centuries-old vampire waiting for the “innocent young virgin” who will “complete him” just makes me gag. The uneven power play in that relationship is even worse than the billionaire who wants a poor college student. Equally unbelievable.
I write contemporary erotic romance, but wrote 2 novellas about vampires because of some dreams I had where the characters told me I had to write their story. The heroine is a neurobiologist in each book. Two books was enough. I’m leery of ever starting to “phone it in” in a series. Too many of my formerly favorite auto-buy authors seem to start doing that, sooner or later. How disappointing.
I worked a library reference desk for several years and saw the same dismay as patrons progressed through the Anita Blake series. I remember listening to the audiobook version of Micah (I think) and the erotica went on for so long that I actually got bored, switched to the next CD, and was pretty sure I was still on the same sex scene.
My best theory about Anita is that in those early books, despite the vampires and werewolves and special powers and such, there was still something inherently human about her that the reader could connect with. After book 10 or so, I just didn’t *get* her.
There are still a few authors I follow…J.R. Ward, Kim Harrison, Darynda Jones. These days, I’m leaning more toward paranormal elements: Nora Roberts, Jayne Ann Krentz, Kay Hooper, Amanda Stevens. And I’m on the hunt for some really great ghost stories.
I’ve only really discovered Romance as a genre I adore in the last few years—I read heavily in sci-fi and high fantasy, but completely missed out on urban fantasy and PNR. The good news is I’ve been able to wade into it with excellent authors and series (I started with Nalini Singh!), so I haven’t yet hit the wall of unending serieseses. I missed Anita Blake completely (but am tempted to read the first few), and while I’ve seen the movie for Interview with the Vampire, I’ve not read a Rice book either. Whoops.
I’m still very happily enjoying PNR (and other romance subgenres!), UF, and still digging up some high fantasy and SF although I’ve now realized that my old favourites had strong romantic elements to them. I’ve only started to slow down on series with Julie Anne Long’s Pennyroyal Green series (I can’t get enough of Julia Quinn, goodness knows I’ve tried) and the House of Night series which, in my defense, I started joint-reading with a friend because they are pure WTF and after 9 books the WTF is not enough of a draw.
I do feel some series fatigue with my trusty fantasy and sci-fi series—Forgotten Realms, Star Trek and Star Wars all have such massive extended universes that it’s hard to keep up, although I still read things by favourite authors (just usually in their own worlds, now). Sometimes the thought of starting a high fantasy series fills me with dread. I skipped an entire generation of Forgotten Realms and am skipping the current generation of Star Wars (although it’s about to get chainsawed out of canon, so there’s that). I feel like I should have outgrown Mercedes Lackey but I just can’t quit her, and my mom has recently glommed ALL of her books off my e-reader so I think I feel a little better about that.
So pretty much I’m coming from the eyes of someone just discovering—and inhaling—PNR, and the suggestions in the comments are either things I’m nodding along with, or jotting down to try. I think the only one I’d add would be Vivian Arend, mostly because she flips the mating bond stuff on its head (“Yeah, you wolves are weird with the insta-mate stuff. Cats TALK about it and CONSIDER it.”) and her characters are adorable. Plus Whitehorse, where I will return to stay forever once they have decent internet.
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again folks – Mima’s “Within” series. Full of all of the best loved tropes above, but man that chick has some interesting things to day about gender…
I’ve never been into paranormal, romance or otherwise. I liked Robin McKinley’s Sunshine, which I really only read because it was written by McKinley. I read Sharon Shinn’s Archangel series, if that counts, but I considered it more of an odd scifi/fantasy than paranormal, even though some of the characters are angels.
And then I fell madly in love with Ilona Andrews’ stuff. The Edge series is totally paranormal romance and is good. The Kate Daniels series is paranormal with a side of romance and is amazing. Forget about the genre. Read Magic Bites because it’s just that good.
For anyone interested in paranormal and f/f romances, I heartily recommend Jae’s shapeshifter books (so far Second Nature and True Nature, and some novellas). I found Jae through a (great) totally normal lesbian contemporary, but she does very well with the paranormal genre. They’re not the dark, magical, ancient evil, blah-de-blah of many of the books mentioned here (like Kalayna Price’s Grave series, which I also enjoyed), but they’re good romances with a well-developed paranormal world.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Devon Monk’s Allie Beckstrom series, which has now been completed with the publication of book 9, and Marjorie M. Liu’s Hunter Kiss series, which has the latest book coming out next month. I read both series avidly, along with many of the ones mentioned above.
I’m going to put in a word for Kat Richardson’s “Greywalker” series (UF light on romance) because, although the supernatural elements are pretty bogstandard, the romance is refreshing. The super-tough heroine gradually falls for a nice, nerdy guy with no supernatural abilities, who is the “brains” to her “brawn”, and who is great at providing emtional support. It’s sweet—rare in PNR, right?
I discovered PNR in high school too, but i didn’t like Anita Blake from the get-go – couldn’t stand Hamilton’s writing (& I tried her other Merrie Gentry series but had the same problem)…..and from hearing all the Anita Blake bashing over the years, I’m glad I avoided the whole mess. But I loved the Amanda Ashley brooding vampires – still read her stuff sometimes, though I’m woefully behind….
I was also reading up all the paranormal subseries that were in the regular Harlequin series (Heartbeat was one of them, I think), not to mention the Silhouette Shadows, & I don’t know how well they would hold up to rereads…..I’ll have to find out soon….
No one’s mentioned Lori Herter’s David de Morrissey vampire – dark, brooding, well-written, & they still hold up to rereads! they’ve been OOP for a while, but well worth the hunt – Obsession is the first, and there’s four books in the series.
Nowadays, I read romance all over the place, steampunk, historical mysteries, sci-fi, urban fantasy, and anything else my review-reading takes me – but I still dip into the PNR pool occasionally….I’m just a lot pickier about my choices now – no time in life for DNFs!
And yes, I was totally in the Sci-Fi Book Club as a teenager too! 🙂
Anita Blake got me into paranormals, too, and the series lost me when Micah basically raped Anita in the showers. I hate that LKH went with some slut-shamey reasoning for Anita wanting to bang lots of people instead of just… wanting to bang lots of people. (And the sex scenes got boringly repetitive, but I digress…)
I still love the idea of a paranormal romance, but I just haven’t found any that really do it for me anymore. I’ve switched to reading more urban fantasies or erotic romances. I keep hoping for something new that will shake up the PNR genre, but nothing yet. Sigh.
I have the occasional one night stand or lost weekend with PNR. It’s ok with being used; I don’t think it’s ever been serious about me either.
I thought BDB was cracktastic, and glommed the Underworld General books, and enjoy Jayne Castle although significantly less than other JAK. Same wih Nora Roberts’s paranormals. And, not that I count them as romance exactly, I’ve spent more time than makes sense with Harry Dresden and Sookie Stackhouse and those Jeaniene Frost books.
I actually hated Anita Blake at first, and wished she would stop being such a prude. Whoops. You guys, I’m wicked sorry.
Anne Rice has always been one of my high water marks for bad writing.
Mercedes Lackey gives me fremdschaemen hives.
I felt betrayed by SB Sarah’s Kelly Armstrong recommendation I hated Bitten so much.
Twilight I found strangely clever, but utterly not for me.
Thea Harrison is mind blowingly absurd, but ultimately in a bad way.
Sherilyn Kenyon was ok for a while but I got bored, ditto Gena Showalter and Kresley Cole. I don’t understand why anyone (much less everyone) goes for Nalini Singh or Karen Moning. Christine Feehan I found unreadable, and oh, how I wish I hadn’t read Lora Leigh’s shapeshifters. Or anything else, come to think of it.
Huh. Why do I read so much paranormal when I’ve never loved any?
Mostly I blame Buffy, although sometimes… I’m just not looking for a relationship.
I think I discovered Anita Blake around 1999 and devoured all the books I could find. But I gave up around Obsidian Butterfly, when the stories lost any mystery or even plot and just turned into sex.
I also read Linda Lael Miller’s vampire series that started with Forever and the Night. I thought the premise that the vampires had something to do with Atlantis was cool, though twenty years later I certainly don’t remember much else from the books. I do know that one of the vampire heroes could “touch” the heroine without being physically near her, and the fact that he could give her oral sex without even being in the room was scandalous and (clearly) memorable.
Though I didn’t read the whole vampire series, I did like Anne Rice’s books, both vampirey and not, like Sleeping Beauty and Cry to Heaven.
But by the time 2002 rolled around, I think I was pretty much done with all paranormal. It was fun to read every once in awhile, when I wanted something different, but I’ve never been a fan of sci-fi or fantasy, so I think the ability to suspend disbelief was detrimental to my enjoyment of the genre.
I first started reading this genre during the second coming of Anne Rice. I devoured the Vampire Chronicles. Then LKH came along. She deserves some credit for popularizing the genre-mashup format that informed the tropes of paranormals that came after her. However I also had to quit her after Obsidian Butterfly. It wasn’t the sex. It was that Anita became The Man. This was a natural progression of her character arc, really, but after she finished the transformation from underdog to Big Dog, it was time for her story to end. There is nothing else of interest going on for her as a main character now that she has reached the pinnacle, it’s time for someone else’s character arc to begin. Except her creator can’t seem to let her go.
That’s the case for a lot of series I followed until recently. How much suffering can you watch a main character undergo, before longing for some kind of a resolution that cannot occur if the author wants to keep putting out books starring that character?
Robin McKinley’s Sunshine is the only vampire-related book I’ve ever truly liked. I’ve tried quite a few of the authors others have listed in their comments, and their vampires don’t work for me. I do like some paranormal and fantasy content (I really enjoyed the first five or six books of Rachel Caine’s Weather Warden series, until it became same stuff, slightly different catastrophe pending), but vampires, werewolves, and their ilk—meh.
Count me as another who devoured Anita Blake in the early days, until she took a hard left turn into the land o’ pr0n. I was a huge Buffy fan at the same time, and least for the first several books, both series hit similar bits of my sensibilities.
I mean, heck, time was that the Anita Blakes could pull out REALLY stunning ideas. Like the oldest vampire in the world, old enough that he wasn’t even Homo sapiens—he was Australopithecus. I loved that. And the imagery of a vampire voluntarily committing suicide by sunlight, surrounded by a cloud of his totem butterflies, was one of the moments of beauty I still remember from the series.
But yeah, the series was also responsible for making me leery of a lot of PNR. I realize I’m odd like that, but I _do not care_ about the sexytimes; I don’t need any of it on camera. Amd when you spend three whole chapters on a sex scene… well.
And while I do intend to finish the Sookie Stackhouses eventually, they went on yellow alert with me with how she kept changing who the active love interest was every few books. (Yes, I’m aware of the eventual direction the series took in the books I haven’t read yet.)
Tanya Huff, though, I like me some Tanya Huff and I’m still reading her. And I MUST second the rec for Kat Richardson; I love the primary romance she set up in those books.
@33: I’ve read that account (it’s no longer on her Web site), and have also heard pieces of the story in person—one of my entry points into the Valdemar series was via the filk music, in part because I was local to the publisher thereof. And in turn, that meant that I was in the right place and time to get to several of the smaller cons Mercedes Lackey attended in the Pacific Northwest during the early part of her professional career. And stalkerish creepiness notwithstanding, the primary reason Misty has given over the years for not writing more Tregarde books is that they didn’t sell particularly well at the time; she had better offers for other series and projects.
In fact, she actually has come back to the character much more recently—2010’s Trio of Sorcery collects a Diana Tregarde adventure, a new story about Jennifer Talldeer (of Sacred Ground), and a story about a new heroine. But that evidently also wasn’t successful enough to jumpstart any new projects (darnit).
To address comments from elsewhere in the message-stream: yes, the Tregarde books are properly urban fantasy rather than PNR (Sacred Ground comes closer, but is still probably better viewed as UF). But they were far enough ahead of the curve when they appeared (1989-91, markedly predating Laurell K. Hamilton) that they were marketed more or less as light horror or “occult suspense”, and have never really recovered from the original lackluster promotion.
I am much more of a UF than PNR. I usually fall back on PNR when I don’t have a Urban Fantasy book to read and that’s the kind of book I’m in the mood for. My story in this genre begins like so many others. I found Anita Blake in 1998. I was a teenage girl and I would secretly write knock off stories in my keyboarding class (I remember that so well). The first book I read was either Circus of the Damned or Lunatic Cafe, I can’t remember which but I know it had Richard in it. I couldn’t stand Jean Claude so when I went back to read the first few books I was a little disappointed but I still liked Anita (and I liked that she was “prudish” back then). The last book in that series I enjoyed was Blue Moon (book 8). The last one that I read was Cerulean Sins (book 11) and that was a slog. I just didn’t want to admit that I no longer liked the series.
I gave up on Sookie Stackhouse around book five or six. It just seemed that CH wasn’t that interested anymore.
I like some PNR, but I don’t do vampire romance. I have a visceral squick reaction to the combination of sex and sensuality with death and violence – not sure why I can find shapeshifters sexy and compelling but find undead vampires squicmy, but I do. So I missed a lot of PNR. I love Nalini Singh and Meljean Brook and Zoe Archer.
I just don’t see the attraction of paranormals. But I like Sci-Fi and distopias and futuristic environments.
I tried one JR Ward’s book, but I didn’t like it. I didn’t see the point in a bunch of vampyres who don’t drink human blood, I just didn’t get it, as somebody has already said, these monsters are the enemy, the danger, not somebody you can fall in love with. Moreover you would expect somebody who has lived so many centuries to be sophisticated, very interesting and not a group of friends talking about… sport?
They looked… defanged as someone else has already said. They are not monsters as they traditionally were in the classical books.
So I try to avoid paranormals. That’s why I get angry when I’m reading a perfectly normal contemporary or suspense romance I’m surprised to discover something paranormal in them. I just hate it. That’s one of the reasons I stopped reading Nora Roberts an JAK years ago. But it has happened to me with Karen Robards, and Linda Howard, for instance.