Carole Mortimer

Carole Mortimer sold her first novel, The Passionate Winter, to Mills and Boon in 1978 while still in her teens, and has kept up several books a year ever since, passing the two hundred mark in 2015. Queen Elizabeth II recognised her in 2012 for outstanding service to literature, Romantic Times gave her its Pioneer of Romance award in 2014. The Nora Roberts Lifetime Achievement Award followed from Romance Writers of America in 2015. Her later books are independently published rather than category romances of the kind that built her name. Wicked Torment opens the Regency Sinners, eight gentlemen home from Waterloo who must work out which lady of society has been passing word to the enemy. Christmas Alpha starts the contemporary ALPHA books, a suspense-flavoured series that ran to eight volumes. Deryk and Bryn are the second and third Dragon Hearts novels, a paranormal sequence set among shape-shifters in the Welsh mountains.