Amanda Quick

Amanda Quick is the historical-romance pen name of Jayne Ann Krentz, an American novelist who also writes contemporary romantic suspense under her own name and futuristic romance as Jayne Castle -- one person, three names, and three genuinely separate bodies of work kept deliberately distinct rather than blended. Krentz adopted the Quick name in 1990 for Seduction and has used it exclusively since for historical fiction, mostly set in Regency and Victorian England, with a later run of books moved forward to 1930s Southern California. The novels pair a mystery-thriller plot -- theft, blackmail, murder, secret societies -- with a resourceful, unconventional heroine and a hero carrying a shadowed past, and several of her recurring casts (the Vanza-trained operators, the Arcane Society) work psychic or occult elements into the detection years before that became a genre staple. The Arcane Society is the most unusual of these: a single, decades-spanning story that Krentz tells across all three of her pen names in one continuous, publication-order sequence, so the Amanda Quick installments are only part of a larger continuity that also runs through her contemporary and futuristic identities. With 40 novels as Amanda Quick and tens of millions of copies sold across her combined body of work, Krentz has been a consistent New York Times bestseller since the early 1990s and remains active, with the 1930s-set Burning Cove series her most recent ongoing work under this name.