Nora Roberts

Nora Roberts began writing during a blizzard in February 1979. Her first novel, Irish Thoroughbred, came out from Silhouette in January 1981 as a short category romance, and between 1982 and 1984 she wrote 23 more novels for Silhouette's imprints. She passed 100 novels with Montana Sky in 1996 and doubled that with The Witness in 2012; the count now stands at more than 225. She was a founding member of Romance Writers of America and the first inductee into its Hall of Fame.

Two habits shape her output. She often writes trilogies, finishing all three books in a row so she can stay with the same characters. And since 1995 she has run a second career as J.D. Robb, a name built from her sons' initials (Jason and Dan) and a shortened form of Roberts. As Robb she writes the In Death series, futuristic police procedurals set in a mid-21st-century New York City that follow detective Eve Dallas and her husband, Roarke. Under her own name she has also written fantasy, including the post-apocalyptic Chronicles of The One.

Choose a line before choosing a book, because her three main strands read differently. For the J.D. Robb side, start with Naked in Death (1995), the first In Death novel, and read forward; Eve Dallas and Roarke carry the whole series, so the early books set up characters you will follow for decades. For a single novel under her own name, The Witness (2012), her 200th, is a reasonable test of her later style before committing to a trilogy.

Readers who want speculative fiction should try Year One (2017), the first book of Chronicles of The One. A sickness that begins on New Year's Eve kills more than half the world's population, and as the power grid and governments fail, magic rises in place of technology. The series is three books long, a much smaller commitment than In Death.