Author Details
Author Details
Robb, J. D.
"In the spring of 1995, J.D. Robb?s first book, Naked in Death, appeared on bookshelves with very little fanfare. Robb introduced readers to New York City in the near future, 2058 to be exact, as seen through the eyes of Eve Dallas, a detective with the New York City Police and Safety Department. The Gothic Journal hailed Robb?s work as ?a unique blend of hard-core police drama, science fiction and passionate romance? while The Paperback Forum called it ?a fantastic new detective series.?
The popularity of that first book built up through the release of the subsequent Eve Dallas books. Readers were taken with Eve Dallas? integrity, strength and heart and her burgeoning relationship with the mysterious Roarke.
It?s been a fairly open secret that J.D. Robb is the pseudonym of the more familiar New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts. But Ms. Roberts, and her publisher, Berkley, were content to let the Robb books build slowly with very little tie-in to the Nora Roberts? style of romantic suspense.
The pragmatic reason for creating J.D. Robb was the astounding pace at which Nora Roberts produces books. With nearly 100 published books to her credit by 1995, she had built up a surplus of titles to be released by her publishers, Berkley and Silhouette, and still was creating more. Reluctant to publish romantic suspense books akin to what she was already writing under a pseudonym, Ms. Roberts was convinced that readers would enjoy romantic suspense with a difference. Thus J.D. Robb was born. The initials were taken from Ms. Roberts? sons, Jason and Dan, while Robb was a shortened form of Roberts.
?I wanted to try something a little different. I love writing romance and suspense but also wanted a twist,? explains Ms. Roberts. ?The near future setting provided this and allowed me to more or less create a world. What would it be like in 2058? I could decide. And I could illustrate my own feeling that while the toys may change, people remain basically the same. They still love and hate and covet; they still have courage and cowardice. They're still human.?
The In Death books have afforded Ms. Roberts an opportunity to explore a relationship beyond the ending of the first book. Her trilogies and family stories have been hugely popular with fans ? the recent Chesapeake Bay trilogy, Sea Swept, Rising Tides and Inner Harbor have all spent time at the number one spot on The New York Times bestseller list ? but when the story was over, she moved on to other characters.
?One of the things I wanted to do was develop those characters over many books rather than tying it all up in one,? she says. ?I wanted to explore these people and peel the layers off book by book. Eve and Roarke have given me the opportunity to explore a marriage, as well. Each book resolved the particular crime or mystery that drives it, but the character development, the growth and the changes, the tone of the relationships go more slowly. I'm enjoying that tremendously.?
The experiment has succeeded beyond expectations with the J.D. Robb books regularly hitting the New York Times bestseller list. The release of the 12th book in the series, Betrayal in Death, saw a promotion with the tag line ?You?ve been betrayed? which acknowledged that J.D. Robb is indeed Nora Roberts. In the fall of 2003, the two parts of the Nora Roberts whole joined together to write Remember When. The first half is a Roberts? romantic suspense set in the present, the second half is a Robb IN DEATH that jumps to the near future as Eve picks up a thread that relates to the first part of the book.
Divided in Death, a February 2004 release, begins a new chapter for J.D. Robb. The 18th book in the series is a hardcover and all upcoming originals will be published in that format. Before the move to hardcover, Nora came to an agreement with her publisher that the paperback reissues of hardcover IN DEATHS would be released six months, rather than the traditional year, after the initial hard cover run."
