Magdalen Braden

In her series of sexy contemporary romances, The Blackjack Quartet, Magdalen Braden writes about lawyers, judges, law students, paralegals ... an entire fictional Philadelphia legal community, in fact. Hey, she left her legal career to return to her first love, romance writing, so it makes sense she'd write about the law. As she puts it, "I needed a day job to quit, so I went to law school." Magdalen writes about Philadelphia because she went to law school there, practiced there, and even has a British patent attorney ex–husband still living in the Victorian South Philadelphia house Magdalen bought before they married. (The house used to be part of a convent––another aspect of her past that won't show up in her steamy novels.) In a shameless bid for attention, Magdalen has been known to tell people she and bestselling author Julie James have virtually identical legal careers: Magdalen went to a better law school but Julie had the better federal clerkship. In addition to writing, Magdalen keeps busy completing her Masters in Fine Arts degree from Stonecoast, the University of Southern Maine's MFA program, one of only two in the country that acknowledges romance novels exist, let alone comprise a wildly popular fiction genre. She even submitted a scholarly essay on Susan Elizabeth Phillips' "Dream a Little Dream" in her first semester. What time Magdalen has left over is spent with her second British husband (what can she say? She has a type!) in their two–hundred–year–old house in rural Pennsylvania with their cats and dog.