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Gwyn Cready has quickly become one of my favourite Romance authors - she combines fun plots and engaging characters, laughter and tragedy, intelligent dialogue and charismatic villains, providing unputdownable adventures and sizzling chemistry. I've read three so far of the four books published, and loved them all. They're not part of a series, but they all have one thing in common: time travel.

Josephine (commonly called "Joss") is doing everything she can to keep her mother's mapmaking business afloat since her father nearly ruined the company that it falls under. Now he's been dead three months and sexy entrepreneur Rogan Reynolds has stepped in to save the business - which includes her maps. Not only that, but Joss has agreed to marry him and already lives with him in his penthouse apartment. Everything's going as smoothly as it can with her wedding coming up soon, until one night she sees something very strange indeed and becomes very curious in the three strange occupants of a disused tailor shop - especially in the tall, dark and handsome Hugh.

In what seems like a convoluted plot but which you won't have any trouble following if you just stick with the first somewhat confusing chapters, Hugh and his companions have used a time portal to come to the present to find a map that Joss's father had stolen from the past - a map that made him a rich man and provided Joss with her luxurious childhood. By stealing it, he made sure a land change didn't go ahead that would have made a different family rich - instead they were beggared and forced to work in the mines.

And it turns out that Joss's mother, a skilled mapmaker herself, was from Hugh's time, and made three maps that provide clues as to the whereabouts of a hidden treasure - just not the one they're all hunting for. Joss is torn: she knows her father did a bad thing, she knows he wasn't a great man, but he was her father, and by changing the past (again), her own past would drastically alter, and not for the better. Then there's Rogan - Hugh suspects he's looking for the map as well, and has nefarious reasons for wanting to keep Joss close. Soon only a trip back to the past can possibly resolve the problems facing them.

Cready's books are so much more intelligent and lively than most Romance novels - I rather feel like rescuing them from the Romance section, simply because the genre gives us such low standards of what can be achieved. With Cready, I know I'm always in good hands. I find that I smile constantly while reading her books, and laugh out loud too. Not many books can make me laugh. I find them hard to put down, and this one was no exception. They're light on the sex side of things, being more concerned with plot development, character development and chemistry, but when there is sex it's tasteful and electrically charged (all that sexual tension, y'know).

So really, if there were one Romance author I'd recommend above all others, it'd be Gwyn Cready. I just love her books, and I'm always eagerly on the lookout for more.