Dear Author: Romance Book Reviews, Author Interviews, and Commentary

Dear Ms. Joyce,

I've been reading your books since The Veil of Night came out. I thought it was a bit above average for a debut, but conventional. The two books that followed were somewhat stronger in my opinion. All three showed a talent for conjuring an atmosphere, and main characters of diverse personalities and backgrounds. But in the first half of your fourth book, Voices of the Night, you have for the first time succeeded in riveting me.
Fog pressed down upon the city, smothering it, pulling the smoke down from the chimney pots to swirl in the streets under the weight of the brown and breathless sky. It was a black fog, a killing fog, and Maggie and the other chavies had coughed up soot every morning that week when Johnny kicked them awake.
This bit of description on page one was the first clue I was reading something truly different. Here was a London not often seen in the romance genre, a tough, sooty metropolis in which the weak often perish and even the strong don’t …