I write contemporary romance, for the most part. Of my eighteen published novels, fifteen are contemporary. The other three, however, are paranormal—the Ramos Family Trilogy that I wrote for Berkley InterMix about a family of mediums in San Antonio. That trilogy was so much fun to write that I’ve always had a secret wish to do more paranormal stories. And now I have.

My new Folk series for Soul Mate Publishing isn’t about mediums. It’s about fairies. Okay, I can hear the eye rolls from here, but bear with me. My fairies aren’t Shakespeare’s fairies. They’re the Folk: a group of clans who migrated to the USA from Europe several generations ago. They look and act like everybody else, but they’re not. Each clan has a set of magical abilities which they’re supposed to keep secret from “mortals” like us. There’s also a hidden hierarchy of governance for the clans, all the way up to a royal family that has a palace in Interlocken, Colorado (by a strange coincidence, that’s a suburb only a few miles from my house).

The Folk are human, mostly. But they can do a few unusual things, like spells that will freeze beer or power blasts that can send a person flying across the room. The hero of Book 1, Away, is Grim Morrigan, a member of the Folk police force, the Ward. Grim’s job is trying to enforce the rules, to keep the Folk under the radar, something the individual clans aren’t always good about. His life is fairly routine until he encounters Annie Duran, a waitress at one of the local clubs who saw her brother in the parking lot one night—the same brother who had disappeared into a mountain cave ten years ago.

As Annie and Grim work together to discover what happened to her brother, they uncover a conspiracy with dark roots and sinister implications. They also meet a variety of colorful characters, including a prince with a bit of satyr in his bloodlines.

On this blog, I’ll be talking a lot about those colorful characters and about how I researched the Folk and their clans. Like the Ramos books, the Folk books mix real and fantastic. The locations for Away feature lots of places around the foothill suburbs of Denver where I live, but, of course, the things that happen there are a far cry from my normal daily routine.

I had a wonderful time creating the Folk, and I hope to go on working with them for a while. You can preorder Away now; it’ll be released on May 23.