Standalone Novels
While a series permits a writer to develop a set of characters over a period of time, a standalone novel represents the only opportunity these people have to live and breathe and tell their stories. Even if some of them reappear (and my standalones do have the occasional link and overlap), their book must have a sense of completeness, must contain an entire universe within its pages.
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Touchstone
(2007) ISBN 978-0-553-80355-6 (UK) ISBN 978-1-84722-005-9 Here, among a titled family whose servants dress in whimsical costumes and whose daughter conducts an open affair with a man who wants to bring down the government, Stuyvesant finds himself dangerously seduced by one woman and—even more dangerously—falling in love with another. And as he sifts through secrets divulged and kept, he uncovers the target of a horrifying conspiracy, and wonders if he can trust his touchstone, Grey, to reveal the most dangerous player of all… |
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Califia’s Daughters
(2004) by Leigh Richards (Pseudonym for Laurie R. King) ISBN 978-0-553-58667-1 Laurie’s first non-mystery, a paperback original novel of the near future. |
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Keeping Watch
(2003) ISBN 978-0-553-38252-5 (Nominated for the Barry Award) The “ghost” of Folly island, Allen Carmichael, is a man with a few ghosts of his own, which accompany him as he performs his rescues of abused children and their mothers. Only his ghosts don’t tell him when one day he meets a child who may not be the innocent victim he appears. |
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Folly
(2001) ISBN 978-0-553-38151-1 (Macavity Award Winner, A Booksense Choice) The book that nearly emptied Random House, New York, as half the staff came perilously near to deciding that if Rae Newborn could go to an island and rebuild an old house, why couldn’t they? After all, they didn’t begin with her problems, did they? |
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A Darker Place
(1999) ISBN 978-0-553-57824-9 Published in the UK as The Birth of a New Moon Professor Anne Waverley’s sabbaticals from her university are a bit different: They take her into potentially disastrous religious movements, and into potentially devastating relationships. |
