A Bit About Anne's World...
When she wrote her fourth book, Quicksilver Season, Anne fell in love with Brendan Craig, the hero. She falls in love with all her heroes – couldn't live with them so intensely if she didn't. But when she got Brendan to his Happily Ever After, he wouldn't go away.
He said, "Remember Griff and Lainie? From my book? Remember how everything went so smooth for them when Cassie and I were having all those problems?"
Anne remembered. Griff and Lainie got everything right. She remembered wondering why it couldn't be that simple for Brendan and Cassie. Brendan just shook his head and rolled his eyes and said, "If it's simple, no book."
He was right, of course. And then he told her Griff and Lainie's perfect marriage wasn't so simple either. In fact it was over – Griff had walked out.
She said, "WHAT! He can't do that! He's supposed to be happy!"
"Up to you, I guess," Brendan said, and sauntered out. "I could help," he offered over his shoulder. "f you want to write another . . . "
And that's when Anne discovered that stories don't necessarily confine themselves to a single book. Of course she knew that peoples' lives didn't start on page 1. But she had no idea then that they could go on for so many books that sometimes she even lost count!
Over the years Anne's world has included quite a few mini-series of linked books. You don't need to read them sequentially. You don't even need to read all of them. And you certainly don't need to hang onto them until you get all of them, and then start to read! Just dip in and enjoy.
And know that in many cases characters you meet will turn up again, not just in their own mini-series. In Anne's world they might turn up anywhere. You never can tell!
Beware of Greeks!
Anne's very first Greek tycoon was on the cover of one of her books. He was supposed to be Owain O'Neill, the Welsh rock singer turned historian in Dream Chasers. Of course, he was neither, but he did become a very good friend — and an inspiration of sorts.
All her Greek heroes owe a little bit to him.
There have been quite a few starting with Damon Alexakis in The Alexakis Bride, right up to the one she's dealing with now — film director Demetrios Antonides who's finding a bit more than he bargained for in the woman he spirits away at the film festival in Cannes.
All her Greek heroes find a bit more than they bargained for when they meet the heroines of their lives in Anne's books. Whether they are real business tycoons like Damon and Elias or sailboat racing loners like Theo or beach bums like PJ, they are fun to write about, to challenge and match wits with.
They keep Anne on her toes, especially when they turn out to be guys like Spencer Tyack — who isn't even Greek! — but who nearly hijacked The Santorini Bride and had to be promised a book of his own (The Boss's Wife for a Week) before he would settle down and behave himself. Spence is an honorary Greek tycoon.
One lovely thing about these Greeks, especially the Savas and Antonides guys, is they seem to have vast extended families intent on providing Anne with lots of stories down the road. She can't wait.
View the books in the Beware of Greeks series.
Pelican Cay
Sand and sea and sun are three of the main ingredients of paradise to Anne's way of thinking. She hasn't quite figured out how to get the cowboy and the horse to the Caribbean, but she's working on it.
In the meantime she's delighted to share Pelican Cay with a soccer goalkeeper turned entrepreneur, a devil-may-care charter pilot, and a Spanish playboy — not to mention the women who get to tame them!
Pelican Cay first appeared in some of Anne's earlier Presents novels and figured prominently in the lives of all of the Wolfe brothers in her New York! New York! mini-series By the time she finished writing NATHAN'S CHILD and was in the middle of yet another northern winter writing about Caribbean sea breezes, she found herself longing to go back for an extended period of time. Writing about Lachlan, Hugh and Molly McGillivray has given her the opportunity to spend a whole vicarious year there.
Now she's finished, but every day she wants to pack up her flippers and her sun screen and go back in person! For the moment, though, she's going to have to settle for living through Lachlan and Fiona, Hugh and Sydney, and Joaquin and Molly!
View the books in the Pelican Cay series.
New York! New York!
Anne is not a big city girl, but if she had to pick a city to live in, there's no question which she'd pick — NEW YORK! As different as it might seem from "mainstream America" it embodies much of the American spirit — it's vital, strong, diverse, colorful.
The whole city hums with an energy that exists nowhere else. And the energy rubs off on the people who live there or grew up there — Finn MacCauley, Sam Fletcher, Gibson Walker and Rhys, Dominic and Nathan Wolfe — who meet challenges head on, who know how to get what they want and do whatever they need to do.
It's a city that can be a little bit daunting, too. Izzy isn't sure if she's up to the challenge — of New York and of Finn. Josie, safe and settled in Dubuque, has no desire to leave home. But Sam's life is there, and wherever Sam goes, she'll take the risk. And Chloe — well, Chloe wants that one magical summer. A small town girl with big beautiful dreams, Chloe doesn't want New York forever, just for the moment — until she meets Gibson.
Chloe's neighbor Rhys has his hands full when Chloe moves out and Mariah Kelly moves back in. He and Mariah have been friends for a long time. But then one night something happens between them...and suddenly Rhys's world is turned upside down. Not long afterwards, his tough businessman brother Dominic has his own world turned upside down by Mariah's free-spirited purple-haired sister, Sierra.
Nathan Wolfe, Rhys and Dominic's brother, never spent much time in New York after growing up there. The free-wheeling photographer saw the whole wide world as his home,. To call him "footloose" would be mild. But Dominic has news for Nathan — news that sends him to the small Bahamian island of Pelican Cay — and a confrontation with Carin Campbell. He has a lot of questions, first and foremost, "Why didn't you tell me you'd had my child?" Nathan and Carin's story brings them to New York, too, where they have to confront the past and each other. Like I said, in New York there's always a lot going on!
View the books in the New York! New York series | View the Wolfe Family Tree
Code of the West
The first man Anne McAllister fell in love with was a cowboy. She was five and he was nineteen, and she followed him everywhere. It was, she thinks, a case of imprinting — like a duck. In any case, tall, dark, handsome lone-wolf types have appealed to her ever since.
"Me, for instance," her college professor husband says. Well, yes. But even though she's been married to the man of her dreams for over thirty years, she still loves writing about those men of the west!
So far there have been seventeen CODE OF THE WEST titles. One of them, A COWBOY'S PROMISE, links with an earlier mini-series Anne did for the Harlequin American line, in particular the book GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT. Which just goes to show that there is a whole alternative universe out there and you never know when threads are going to weave together.
The most recent book in this series came out from Harlequin Presents in ONE-NIGHT LOVE CHILD, the story of Flynn and Sara from THE GREAT MONTANA COWBOY AUCTION. As she still hears from people wanting Logan and Addie's story, Anne hopes someday to write that, too. But not just yet.
If you've ever tried to keep all these folks straight, a timeline and family tree pages might help. We'll be putting it up as we get things sorted out.
View the books in the Code of the West series.
Imagine
Imagine what would happen if you wrote a romance and the man on your cover — your hero! — turned up on your doorstep!
That's the sort of thing Anne thinks about when she's staring at a blank screen! So she just sort of imagined what would happen when one did — and wrote IMAGINE about how Frances Moon's life changed when Jack Neillands appeared.
But then Jack had a friend called Carter, and Carter fell in love with Diane. But Nick was already in love with Diane. And if Nick got Diane, Carter had to have a love of his own. Anne — and a whole lot of readers — figured that out.
So then there was Annabel. And her kids. And a baby. And a goat. Carter got more than he expected in that book.
There were a couple of anthologies, too. One about what happened at Nick and Diane's wedding and another that took place back in Boone's Corner, Vermont several years later when Lucy Potter accidentally took Holt Braxton home for Christmas.
Anne is very glad Boone's Corner is still there. She never knows when a small Vermont town will come in handy!
The middle book in the IMAGINE series, I THEE WED, was reprinted as a part of a two-fer in MARRY ME . . . MAYBE? in 2004.
View the book in the IMAGINE series now.
Quicksilver
Anne spent her formative years on southern California beaches. And while she imprinted on a cowboy, she can't quite shake the sand from her toes.
The Quicksilver books have a lot of Anne's favorites in them — baseball and beaches, San Francisco and sand castles, The Strand in Manhattan Beach and the Channel Islands off the California Coast. There are a few old family stories dressed up in new clothes.
The books were a delight to write because they allowed Anne not only to go back to old haunts and reconnect with old friends, but to do lots of fun "research" into making sand castles, rehabbing a baseball player's broken arm, becoming a priest, being an umpire, finding one's roots on the Navajo reservation, restoring a Victorian house, getting a divorce in Alameda County, getting arrested for soliciting a prostitute, soothing the painful gums of teething babies, stealing a Porsche, being a hero in pursuit of losing his virginity . . .
Oh, there's no end to the amazing stuff writers get to learn — and no end to the kind and interesting people they get to meet while doing so!
The amazing thing is, these characters hung around. In GIFTS OF THE SPIRIT, the last of the five, there was a teenager in trouble and in need of a good role model. Joanna Hancock-Smith was determined that Chase Whitelaw was going to be that man. He was. And thirteen actual years later the boy, Charlie Seeks Elk, came back as the hero of a book of his own — A COWBOY'S PROMISE — in Anne's Code of the West series! Lots of the Quicksilver folks came back to visit, too. It was like "old home week."
