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Nancy Richards-Akers

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Nancy Linda Richards was born in 16 January 1954, the oldest of three children of a New England physician and his wife. She grew up in suburban Scarsdale, New York. In 1971, she graduated at Mount Vernon College. In her early career, she wrote speeches for a North Carolina congressman, and later worked at a firm that produced political ads. In 1976, Nancy met Jeremy Ray Akers, while both were staffers on Capitol Hill. He was a Vietnam War hero, awarded two Purple Hearts and a Silver Star for valor, who had gone on to graduate from the University of Virginia law school. After being pregnant, Nancy married Jeremy on 11 Agust 1977, in a small ceremony at Georgetown's Christ Church. But not long time later, he began to abuse her. In 1979, the family moved to Miami, where he worked as an assistant state attorney under Janet Reno. In 1983, they returned to to Washington, where he took a job with the Justice Department handling environmental cases, and she went to work for a time as a receptionist at a political consulting firm. But he did not like that she works outside, she cast about for something she could do at home, and came up with writing romances. Nancy became a member of the Washington chapter of the Romance Writers of America, and she collaborated researching on early novels with Mary Kilchenstein (Mary Kirk), under the pseudonym Mary Alice Kirk. In 1987, she published her first single-handed book, "The Mayfair Season", and began a solid career as romance novelist. In 1997 her last book "Wild Irish Skies" was named one of the top 10 romance novels of that year by The Washington Post. Her husband's own environmental consulting firm, started in 1990, began to falter, and his bills and financial mismanagement, were eaten up all her income. The strain on their relationship intensified, and finally, she decided escape. She moved to live with a friend, Jim Lemke, a 26 truck driver and aspiring poet, who later became her boyfriend. One year later, the Satu