orn in England to American parents, Katy Cooper thinks it almost inevitable that she became a writer of historical romances. "My mother was an English teacher and my father loved history. They always had a lot of books around and let me read whatever I wanted." Katy's reading included her mother's copies of Georgette Heyer's Regency romances and her father's battered editions of Thomas B. Costain's four-volume Plantagenet Chronicles. "Georgette Heyer's wonderful books were the beginning of my love of romance-how could they not be? And Thomas Costain entranced me with his vision of the passion and pageantry of medieval English history." Her father was a career Air Force officer, and the life of a military family is something that Katy considers an asset in her writing. "Living in so many places-Turkey, Hawaii, Colorado, to name the ones I remember best-taught me something about how differently people can behave in different times and places, which is something to bear in mind when writing about the past. And the hierarchies of the military extend to families, too. So the issues of rank and status that mattered so much in the Middle Ages are issues that I grew up with to a certain degree." After years of travel, Katy lives in Peabody, Massachusetts, with her husband Jim.
