A pretty and pastoral cover for Thursday….

An audio cover for Wednesday! This has the unique distinction of being the only submission for the Orchid Affair cover contest designed explicitly with the audio version in mind.

It seemed appropriate to kick off RWA, from which I always lug home way too many books, with an image featuring a lady reading. In The Orchid Affair, many of Laura Grey’s clandestine activities are conducted by means of a bookshop. Who, after all, would think anything of a governess purchasing books for her charges?

Because Mondays are always tough, here’s a bright and cheerful cover to kick off the week. Doesn’t it just beg for a caption? I’d love to know what he’s saying and what she’s thinking.

The cover contest bounty continues! We have nearly fifty entries, each as lovely as the last. I’ll be displaying them all on August 2nd, once the contest officially closes, but, in the meantime, here’s our cover of the day. Light and floral, this seemed particularly appropriate for a sunny Saturday.

Back to the slightly more traditional…. Another prescient cover! One of the pivotal scenes in the book involves an artist’s studio, a crimson velvet throw and Laura letting her hair down. Since it’s Friday, let’s make it a double feature, shall we? It’s gray and rainy today where I am– rather like Laura’s Paris, where…

See what I meant about all the covers being different? The double-framing device in this cover picks up not only on the leitmotif of art and artists, but also the ongoing theme of dual identities. Appropriate for a spy novel, no? Miss Grey is a governess turned spy pretending to be a governess. As for…

One of the things I’ve enjoyed most about the contest submissions is how different they all are from each other. As a governess, Laura, heroine of The Orchid Affair, spends a lot of time standing in the doorway between nursery and schoolroom, listening. Listening for her charges, listening for her employer, listening so she can…

Like the lady in this portrait, Laura Grey, the heroine of The Orchid Affair, is dark-haired and dark-eyed and always, always wears dark clothing. So many entries have come in that I may start displaying two a day!

This cover is really rather prescient. Although you can’t tell from Chapter One, there’s a major sub-theme in The Orchid Affair involving the art and the artists of the 1790’s. My heroine grew up in the heart of Europe’s artistic diaspora, while my hero’s (deceased) wife, Julie Jaouen, was a major painter in her own…