Amanda Quick

Three names, three shelves. Jayne Ann Krentz signs her contemporary romantic suspense with her own name, her futuristic novels as Jayne Castle, and her historical ones as Amanda Quick. Born at Cobb, California in 1948, she took history at Santa Cruz, then took a graduate degree in library science at San Jose State and worked for years as a librarian, first in the Virgin Islands and afterwards in academic libraries including Duke, before publishing a first novel in 1979. Both Burning Cove novels are set in a fictional 1930s Californian resort full of film people, racketeers and spies. The Lady Has a Past, fifth in that run, follows Lyra Brazier and the antiquarian bookseller Simon Cage as they look for a missing investigator. When She Dreams, the sixth, pairs Maggie Lodge, assistant to an advice columnist, with a threadbare private detective named Sam Sage to trace a blackmailer.