Megabestselling author Nora Roberts came up to New York earlier this week, and she and Berkley Books threw a tea party in the penthouse suite of her hotel to lay the promotional groundwork for “The Bride Quartet,” a series of novels about the women who run a Connecticut wedding planning agency that kicks off with Vision in White next May. “I wanted to go back and do some straight romance, which I haven’t done in a long time,” explained Roberts (center, flanked by Writers House agent Jodi Reamer and Berkley publisher Leslie Gelbman). She’d had so much fun being involved in the preparations for her youngest son’s wedding that the concept came to her pretty quickly, and soon she’d sketched out the four characters— the photographer, the florist, the pastry chef, and the event planner—and chose the Connecticut setting, rather than some place close to her home in Maryland, partly for the huge estates but also because it made it much easier for the women to run into New York City.
If these books take off, we wondered, would Roberts go beyond the fourth book, which is scheduled for publication in 2010? (Even as we asked this, we were mentally chastising ourselves: if a Nora Roberts book takes off? Gee, you think?) No, she said, any time she’s written a series, it has a definite ending, and that’ll hold true here.