Welcome to my website! Here, you'll find information about the novels and novellas I've published over the course of the past decade plus.

Over the past few years, I've tapped into my fascination with 19th century American cities to create the Gilded Age mystery series, which I write as P.B. Ryan. The series is set in post-Civil War Boston and stars Nell Sweeney, a young Irish-born governess with a not-so-respectable past that must be kept hidden at all costs. Nell is assisted in her sleuthing by her employer's black sheep son, Will Hewitt, whom one reader summed up with glib precision as "rich boy, martyr, and rake."

The reaction of the series' fans to the complicated, slowly evolving relationship between Nell and Will ("the beating heart of the series" according to another reader) has been really gratifying. As the arc of that relationship began to draw to its natural conclusion, I made the bittersweet decision to end the series with Book #6, A BUCKET OF ASHES, which will be published in December of 2007. This final book, which made me cry more than once as I wrote it, wraps things up in a way that should be eminently gratifying to Nell and Will's many admirers.

The Gilded Age series has been as popular with critics as with readers, and MURDER IN A MILL TOWN was nominated for the coveted Mary Higgins Clark Award.

As Patricia Ryan, I've written seventeen romances, both contemporary and historical. I'm proud to say that one of the latter, SILKEN THREADS, won Romance Writers of America's RITA Award for Best Long Historical Romance in 2000. I've branched off during the past few years into other genres, but I still love romances, and hope to publish more of them in the future.

My romantic oeuvre consists so far of eight Harlequin Temptations, six medievals, two contemporary novellas, and one historical novella. What all my romances have in common is a high level of both emotion and eroticism, but many readers have commented on the contrast between the dark complexity of my historicals and the light, often humorous tone of my contemporaries.

My newest project is the Hidden Grotto series of epic erotica for Bantam Books, which I'm writing as Louisa Burton (in homage to Sir Richard Burton, who translated the Kama Sutra). The first book in the series, HOUSE OF DARK DELIGHTS, is on sale now.