Emma Cane Books in Order

If you want the core Valentine Valley experience: A Town Called Valentine → True Love at Silver Creek Ranch → The Cowboy of Valentine Valley
If you want to keep going with the main series: A Promise at Bluebell Hill → Sleigh Bells in Valentine Valley → Ever After at Sweetheart Ranch
If you prefer shorter Valentine Valley stories: A Wedding in Valentine → When the Rancher Came to Town → Secrets in Valentine Valley → A Second Chance in Valentine Valley
If you want a new setting with strong family ties: At Fairfield Orchard → Spiced Apple Winter → The Apple Blossom Café

Emma Cane is the contemporary romance name used by Gayle Callen, and her books feel rooted in places where people know one another's business, for better and worse. She grew up in Erie, Pennsylvania, and when she was 13 she was already down in the basement with an old typewriter, writing science fiction stories about teenagers in space who somehow always ended up in love.

The romance part stuck.

A high school slumber party changed the direction of her reading life. She borrowed a friend's copy of Shanna by Kathleen Woodiwiss, stayed up all night to finish it, and found the kind of book she wanted to write. She went off to college and chose engineering instead of writing, but the idea never really left her.

Later, after she was married and had young children, writing pulled her back in. She moved from the typewriter to a computer, started trying her hand at romance in earnest, and kept going through the slow, stubborn learning curve that most writers know well. It took her 13 years and three completed manuscripts before she sold her first book in 1998.

That long apprenticeship led to a career with more than one lane. Under her own name, Gayle Callen, she has written historical romance and historical fiction, and she has also written medieval-set books as Julia Latham. Under the Emma Cane name, she turned to contemporary romance and built the warm, interconnected small-town worlds that readers know from A Town Called Valentine and the books that followed.

Her best-known Emma Cane novels are set in Valentine Valley, a fictional Colorado mountain town full of ranchers, widows, bartenders, teachers, florists, and people who keep bumping into old feelings. Books like True Love at Silver Creek Ranch, Sleigh Bells in Valentine Valley, and Ever After at Sweetheart Ranch all work as romances on their own, but part of the fun is watching families and neighbors keep reappearing from book to book.

She later shifted to Virginia for the Fairfield Orchard stories, including At Fairfield Orchard, Spiced Apple Winter, and The Apple Blossom Café. Those books trade some of the cowboy flavor for apple trees, family business drama, old local history, and couples trying to figure out whether home is a place they left behind or the one they still want to build.

Place matters in her books.

So do second chances. Again and again, her characters are people with a bruise or two, divorce behind them, grief they haven't finished with, careers that pulled them away from home, or secrets they would rather leave buried. What readers tend to get from her stories is not flashy plot for its own sake, but a steady mix of attraction, family pressure, humor, and the kind of emotional untangling that makes a happy ending feel earned.

These days she lives in a suburb of Central New York with her husband, Jim. Their three children are grown, and she has written about enjoying time with her grandkids, along with reading, singing, travel, crocheting, camping, snowshoeing, and deep dives into historical research. That mix of domestic detail, curiosity, and persistence feels a lot like her fiction, cozy at first glance, but built with real craft underneath.