Stars of Mithra

About the Stars of Mithra series

Nora Roberts' Stars of Mithra trilogy is a category-romance romantic suspense sequence built around three enormous, legendary blue diamonds -- the titular Stars of Mithra -- and the women who become their unwilling custodians one book at a time. In Hidden Star, Bailey James wakes with amnesia, a bag of cash, a gun and one of the diamonds in her possession, and turns to private investigator Cade Parris to piece together what happened to her before whoever set her up finds her first. Captive Star follows Bailey's fiercely independent friend M.J. O'Leary, who ends up handcuffed to bounty hunter Jack Dakota after a bail-jumping arrest goes wrong, only for the pair to discover a second Star hidden in her belongings and a set of hired killers on their trail. Secret Star closes the trilogy with homicide detective Seth Buchanan, whose murder investigation is upended when a woman he believed dead, Grace Fontaine, turns up very much alive -- carrying the third and final Star.

Each book pairs a new couple against the same escalating conspiracy chasing the diamonds, so a single overarching mystery -- who is hunting the Stars, and what they're really worth -- only resolves once all three books are read. Originally published as Silhouette Intimate Moments category romances in 1997 and 1998, the trilogy is a compact, fast-paced example of Roberts' 1990s romantic-suspense output, written well before her genre-defining single-title bestsellers of the 2000s.