Stacey Abrams

Is there nothing Stacey Abrams can’t do? asked Tyler Blint-Welsh in The Wall Street Journal. The former Georgia gubernatorial candidate and voting-rights advocate who spearheaded the Democratic Party’s bid to win control of the U.S. Senate also turns out to be a successful romance novelist who has published eight books under a pen name. Abrams, now 47, wrote the first of those novels while she still was a law student at Yale. At the time she chose to use the pseudonym Selena Montgomery, she was putting her own name on a journal article about tax policy and decided that the last thing she wanted was for fiction readers to Google her name and find that paper. “Since I was just starting in the romance field,” she says, “I wanted a separate identity so that people didn’t think it was romance being written by Alan Greenspan.”

The first novel that bears Abrams’ own name is also her first legal thriller, said Sarah Lyall in The New York Times. In While Justice Sleeps, a brilliant law clerk finds herself in the middle of a national crisis when a U.S. Supreme Court justice falls into a coma. Like many of Abrams’ other undertakings, the novel was partly a family effort, with all five of her siblings pitching in. They were encouraged to be avid readers from childhood, after all, and they now maintain a monthly book club as well as ongoing discussions about popular TV series.

One sister helped Abrams get certain biological details right. Another chipped in on religion. Her brother Richard insisted that the climactic scene would move faster without the car chase—and Abrams reluctantly excised it. “I love a good car chase,” she says.