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Iris Johansen

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Iris Johansen was born on April 7, 1938. She worked for a major airline for many years and traveled extensively. After her two children, Tamara and Roy, left home for High School, she decided to devote her newfound free time to writing. Since she loved reading romance novels, she penned a love story, and found to her surprise that "I was just as voracious a writer as I was a reader." During the 1980's, her name was emblazoned on dozens of slender volumes featuring spirited adventuresses, passionate mystery men and smoldering love scenes. These days, Iris is one of a posse of former romance writers dominating the New York Times bestseller lists: Jayne Ann Krentz, Nora Roberts, Linda Howard, Tami Hoag, Sandra Brown and Tess Gerritsen all came up through the category-romance ranks. Iris Johansen's writing hobby became a career after she sent her first romance novel in to Bantam Love swept. Early on in her career, she developed the habit of following characters from book to book, sometimes introducing minor characters in one novel who then become major figures in another. She developed families, relationships and even fictional countries in her romance novels, which "stretched the boundaries of the standard formulas, "according to Barbara E. Kemp in Twentieth-Century Romance and Historical Writers. In 1991, she broke out of category romance (a term for short books written to conform to the length, style and subject matter guidelines for a publisher's series) with The Wind Dancer, a romantic-suspense novel set in16th-century Italy. She followed it with two sequels, Storm Winds and Reap the Wind, to form a trilogy, then wrote several more stand-alone romance novels before The Ugly Duckling was published in 1996. The Ugly Ducklingwas her first book to be released in hardcover, and the first to significantly broaden her readership beyond her romance fan base. Since then, her plots have gotten tighter and more suspense-driven; critics have praised her "flesh