Dream a Little Dream and Ain’t She Sweet by Susan Elizabeth Phillips
Blue Eyed Devil and Devil in Winter by Lisa Kleypas
Thomas is by strong consensus acknowledged as the best wordsmith in the genre. Her prose is complex and delightful, and she plays the language like a finely tuned instrument. Her characters are layered and conflicted, and they actually make huge damning mistakes—something we don’t see much of in romance. All her books are lovely, especially the Fitzhugh Trilogy, but My Beautiful Enemy is set in the Hindu Kush mountains between India and China with a brilliant warrior heroine and a deeply feminist hero, and to me it epitomizes her substantial talent.
