Looking for some great new reading in 2010? Portrait has you covered! Each week we'll spotlight a new author, either contemporary or classical. So keep your eyes on Portrait!

Writer: Lauren Willig

Genre: Historical Romance, Fiction, Chick Lit

Online: Lauren has her own official website with inside information on her books and characters. She even posts short stories and deleted scenes from her novels.

Work: She is currently working on one series of novels that follows the same cast of characters. There are a total of six books published so far, starting with The Secret History of the Pink Carnation, with more on the way.

Why You Should Read: Because Lauren Willig strives to do something a lot of writers don't. She aims for historical accuracy in her romance novels, and if they aren't accurate, she leaves an author's note at the story's conclusion telling you why. In fact, Lauren maintains, in just about any biographical information that you can find on her, that writing historically accurate romance novels was her entire reason for going to college. She got her Doctorate in History from Harvard University, and she spent many hours working on her first novel when she should have been working on her dissertation.

Make no mistake, even though she tries her best to get the history right, these are definitely romance novels that Lauren writes. There are plenty of long suffering sighs and searching glances and other things associated with the romance genre. But, her stories are also those of adventure. One of Lauren's chief inspirations is the story of The Scarlet Pimpernel and that's reflected in each of her novels. The main characters are all female, but they each have their hero (and the hero is almost always one they don't want near them at the novel's start). There are stories of wartime espionage and French and English tensions. There is murder and mayhem. And there is much travel and unmasking of villains.

If that isn't reason enough, she also gives modern romance a nod in her books. She bounces back and forth between a graduate student doing research on a particular set of historical figures and the stories of those (fictional) historical figures themselves. You, as the reader, get to see how the grad student makes the wrong conclusions in her research, while she is also embarking on a modern day tale of love and adventure.

My Pick: Although my favorite is actually her second book, The Mask of the Black Tulip, you still have to start with The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. None of the stories will really make sense otherwise. It is Carnation that provides the need for the research in the modern half of the story, and the rest of the novels follow up with minor characters who appeared in the first book. Everything is chronological, and some events are referenced later in the series that come from the very beginning.