Favorite Author: Shirl Henke and her Wonderful Western Romances with Those Half Indian Hunky Heroes!

Note: Shirl will be a guest on my blog this Thursday and Friday so come back and see what she has to say—I promise it will be worth it!

Shirl Henke is the award-winning author of more than thirty novels and has contributed to four anthologies. She has been a RITA finalist and won seven awards from Romantic Times. She has also made the USA Today bestseller list.

I absolutely love her novels and highly recommend them! Her Western romances are among my favorites as you can see from my Best Western Historical Romances list posted this month. (I haven’t read all of hers or there would be more on the list!)

Though she has written mostly Western historicals, she has also written contemporary and Regency romances. (Her trilogy, The American Lords, covers three different time periods in England: Regency, Victorian and Edwardian.)

She pioneered the well-educated, half Indian hero (see my reviews of CAPTURE THE SUN, NIGHT WIND’S WOMAN and A FIRE IN THE BLOOD posted earlier).

Henke loves “anything Hispanic," from Medieval Spain to Mexico during their turbulent civil war in the late 1860's, and says while most of her books have been set in the 19th Century, a pair spanned the late 15th--early 16th Centuries (Discovery Duet) and several were set during the 18th century (NIGHT WIND'S WOMAN and LOVE A REBEL…LOVE A ROGUE).

She has her B.A. and M.A. in history from the University of Missouri. After earning a job at a university where her husband was a tenured professor, Henke taught history and other subjects. But that job was to end and it’s a good thing for us. She sold her first novel in 1986. Two years later, she left her teaching career to become a full-time writer. Her husband, Jim, took early retirement in order to assist her burgeoning writing career: brainstorming, research and now tracking all her Kindle sales! (What a great guy!)

She wrote her first twenty-two novels in longhand with a ballpoint pen. (“It's hard to get good quills these days. Dragged into the 21st century, I now use one of those ‘devil’ machines. Another troglodyte bites the dust.”)

Here are her wonderful novels:

Old California Couplet

• Golden Lady (1986)
• Love Unwilling (1987)

Texas Trilogy

• Cactus Flower (1988)
• Moon Flower (1989)
• Night Flower (1990)

Discovery Duet

• Paradise And More (1991)
• Return to Paradise (1992)

Santa Fe Trilogy

• Night Wind's Woman (1991)
• White Apache's Woman (1993)
• Deep As the Rivers (1997)

Colorado Couplet

• Terms of Love (1992)
• Terms of Surrender (1993)

Blackthorne

• Love a Rebel, Love a Rogue (1994)
• Wicked Angel (2001)
• Wanton Angel (2002)

American Lord

• Yankee Earl (2003)
• Rebel Baron (2004)
• Texas Viscount (2004)

Wild West

• The River Nymph (2008)
• Pale Moon Stalker (2008)
• Chosen Woman (2009)

The Cheyenne Series:

• Capture the Sun (1988)
• The Endless Sky (1998)
• Sundancer (1999)

Single Novels

• Summer Has No Name (1990), released in 1994 as Bouquet
• A Fire in the Blood (1994)
• Bride of Fortune (1996)
• Broken Vows (1998)
• McCrory's Lady (2002)
• Finders Keepers (2005)
• Sneak and Rescue (2006)
• Love Lessons at Midnight (2010)