Raised in Olathe, Kansas, Cathy Maxwell's love of stories and history come from family tales shared around the dinner table. She's from pioneering stock who first hit these shores on the Mayflower. (She and Dick Cheney share the same Mayflower ancestor. Who would have thought?) She has long called Virginia home, noting she is "a Virginian by choice, but a Kansan by nature." (That means she isn't afraid of a challenge.) She worked in television news as a broadcaster before spending six years in the Navy . . . and then she took to writing.
Maxwell began her writing career in 1991 while her children were still small. "It wasn't easy," she says. "I worked full time, my husband travelled, we had three kids, I volunteered and I was writing from four until seven every morning." Now, twenty years later, she is the author of seventeen national bestsellers and her novels appear regularly on The New York Times and USA Today bestseller lists. Her recent bestseller, The Seduction of Scandal, the fifth and final book in her Scandals and Seductions series, was published in September 2011 and was part of Avon Books' K.I.S.S. and Teal campaign marking National Ovarian Cancer Awareness month.
Maxwell has set all of her novels during the Regency time period. A rarity in the book world, she has published every one of her novels with the same publisher, Harper Collins/Avon Books.