Helen Brooks

Helen Brooks is the pen name under which the English novelist Rita Bradshaw, born in Northampton in 1949, writes contemporary romance for Mills & Boon.

Bradshaw worked as a secretary and began writing in 1990, as her fortieth birthday approached. Her first novel was published by Mills & Boon in 1992 under the Helen Brooks name, and she has since written more than 40 single novels as Helen Brooks, appearing in the Mills & Boon Romance line in Britain and in Harlequin Presents in North America. Since 1998 she has also written historical novels under her own name, beginning with Alone Beneath the Heaven and including the number one bestseller Dancing in the Moonlight (2013), published by Pan Macmillan. She met her husband Clive at sixteen, has three children and lives in Northamptonshire.

For collectors

Her earliest Mills & Boon titles from 1992 are the starting point for a collection. British first printings can precede the North American Harlequin editions by several years: the Romance Wiki lists her first numbered title, Deceitful Lover, as a UK release of March 1992 and a US release of January 1996.