Financial consultant Jessica Larson has achieved success and prestige. But when she meets handsome, intriguing FBI agent Cary Riley, she discovers passions simmering beneath her businesslike reserve. Now, with a dangerous enemy following their every move, Jessica and Cary must face down fears about getting close if they are to gain a love beyond anything they’ve ever imagined . . . .
Image: Courtesy Tamara Sneed
For readers of romance novels, Jessica and Cary’s adventures in Love Undercover offer a sort of indulgent escapism. For the book’s author, however, such works are not an indulgence but a form of therapy. As she puts it, “I have to write just to stay sane.”
Sekret Tamara Sneed (pen name: Tamara Sneed) caught the romance bug as a girl reading young-adult fiction series like Sweet Valley High. Later, she discovered paperback romance novels. “I started writing them,” she says, “because that’s what I enjoyed reading.” Her own works, though no less steamy, differ in one conspicuous way. Whereas the romance novels she used to read featured uniformly white characters, Sneed casts African-Americans in the starring roles.
Sneed is among a growing number of romance novelists working in the African-American subgenre. While she stresses that a book’s overall quality, and not its characters’ skin color, ultimately determines its success, Sneed thinks her heroines deliver a message of importance to all women today: “She doesn’t have blonde hair and blue eyes, and people still find her attractive.”
Photo: Courtesy Tamara Sneed
Sneed, a political science major, started on Love Undercover during the year she took off after college. She traces the inspiration for that story to a Stanford mythology course. Since then, she has written A Royal Vow and When I Fall in Love and has earned a law degree from Georgetown University. Now practicing with the firm of Morrison & Foerster in Los Angeles, she admits that “there probably won’t be a book out every year anymore.” But the practice of law has a lot in common with fiction writing, she says. “You have to be really creative in the law, finding ways to convince a judge to rule for you, even when maybe the law says they shouldn’t. I think a lot of lawyers are repressed creative types.”
Sneed, who lives in Compton with her mother, says her family has encouraged her unusual writing career. “They support me no matter what,” she says.
And her advice for aspiring romance writers? “Write a story that you would like to read.
