Alicia Scott

Alicia Scott is the pen name bestselling thriller writer Lisa Gardner used at the very start of her career, publishing thirteen category romantic suspense novels for Silhouette Intimate Moments between 1992 and 2000. Her debut under the name, Walking After Midnight, appeared in 1992 when Gardner was just twenty years old, pairing a romance plot with the suspense elements that would later come to dominate her work entirely. Most of the Alicia Scott output falls into two connected series, the five-book Guiness Gang and the three-book Family Secrets trilogy, alongside five standalone titles with no series ties, including her contribution to Silhouette's shared, multi-author '36 Hours' continuity line. The Alicia Scott novels are lighter and more conventionally romance-forward than the D.D. Warren and Frankie Elkin thrillers Gardner is now known for, but they already show the tight plotting and page-turning instincts that carried into her later career. Gardner retired the pen name in 2000 with Marrying Mike...Again, after which she began publishing exclusively under her own name and shifted decisively toward the darker, procedural crime fiction that built her reputation. Readers drawn to Gardner's current thrillers will find the Alicia Scott books a different, gentler register, closer to traditional category romance than suspense fiction, and they are generally sought out by longtime fans curious about her earliest work rather than as an entry point to her catalogue. New readers wanting to meet Gardner's fiction are better served starting with Alone, her first D.D. Warren novel.