Once Bitten, Twice Shy

Before she joined Reaper in hunting Gregor's gang of rogue bloodsuckers, privileged princess Topaz was gunning for just one vamp: Jack Heart. The gorgeous con man had charmed his way into her bed, her heart and her bank account, taking her for half a million dollars and vanishing without a word.

Now she and Jack--maddeningly attractive as ever--are supposedly on the same side. As Reaper's ragtag outfit scatters, Topaz sets out to solve a mystery that's plagued her all her lives, mortal and immortal: what really happened to her movie-star mother, who died when Topaz was just a baby? With four men claiming to be her father, why has she always been alone? And what stake does Jack have in discovering the truth about her past? Topaz is sure he's up to something--but her suspicions are at war with her desires....

Maggie Shayne began her writing career in kindergarten, when she painstakingly copied The Brementown Musicians onto construction paper in full Crayola color, complete with illustrations of her own design, and presented it proudly to her teacher. Of course this was not an exact copy. She had tweaked the story a bit, improving it greatly, in her five-year-old opinion.

By third grade her tastes had matured. At story hour, when it was her turn to choose the book from which the teacher would read, Maggie picked Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, which she proceeded to recite from memory as the teacher began reading. Far from being suitably impressed, Maggie recalls her teacher seemed to pale a bit, and looked at her oddly from then on.

Her fondness for the macabre stayed with her, as did her penchant for rewriting her favorite stories. As a teen, while watching her beloved Universal Pictures Monster Classics over and over, she became more and more certain someone had to fix the endings.

It was so obvious that Dracula, the Wolfman, and the dusty Mummy had been cheated! These were not horror flicks, in her teenage opinion. They were romances.

They portrayed a love that went beyond life itself. But the endings were all wrong. Anyone could see the monster was supposed to get the girl!

Well, one marriage and five daughters later, Maggie has made it her mission in life to see to it that old wrongs are set right.

Her stories range from down-home westerns (Texas Brand miniseries, Silhouette Books) to glitz (Million Dollar Marriage, 8/99) to modern-day fairy tales (her Avon contemporary titles).

But her best love is the genre known as paranormal romance. And Maggie writes these like no other author. No one else writing today manages to combine the hearts of two such diverse genres as romance and horror, while still thrilling both segments of the readership with the stunning results.

Shamelessly romantic, breathtakingly emotional, chilling in their suspense, with edge-of-the-seat tension, her stories capture the classic allure that makes beauty-and-the-beast tales so beloved--the key, is the redemption of the monster by the sheer power of love.