Roxanne Longstreet Conrad Books in Order

Roxanne Longstreet Conrad was born at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico on April 27, 1962, and grew up in West Texas. Many readers know her best as Rachel Caine, the pen name she used for much of her fantasy, thriller, and young adult fiction. She also published as Roxanne Conrad, Roxanne Longstreet, and Julie Fortune.

Reading was built into family life early. Her mother loved romance and mysteries, her father loved fantasy and science fiction, and after his Army career ended the family spent plenty of time in used bookstores around El Paso. Conrad graduated from Socorro High School in 1980 and later earned a degree in accounting, with a minor in music, from Texas Tech University in 1985.

Before writing paid the bills, music came first.

She studied clarinet seriously, played with the Lubbock Symphony Orchestra while she was in college, and spent years performing with orchestras around Texas. Writing began in her teens. She later traced it back to two sparks, wanting to change a television story that disappointed her, and a school exercise built around a prompt about midnight changing everything. That was enough to get her moving.

By 1990 she was publishing novels and short fiction, but the career did not unfold in a neat straight line. She wrote in the mornings, worked office jobs, and played evening gigs as a musician. Books sold in fits and starts, often under different names, and success could be hard to predict. That mix of persistence and flexibility became part of her story as much as any single title.

For a long time, writing was the thing she fit in before work, after work, and in the hours most people would have used for sleep.

She was still building another career at the same time. Starting in 1999, Conrad worked in corporate communications, moving through jobs in web design, editing, and management before becoming a communications director. She took a hiatus in 2008 to meet book deadlines, then retired from that day job in 2010 and wrote full time from the Fort Worth area, where she lived with her husband.

That long apprenticeship paid off. As Rachel Caine, she found a huge readership with books that moved fast and never forgot the human stakes. Readers still pick up Glass Houses for its sharp banter and dangerous small-town vampire politics, Ill Wind for its stormy mix of road-trip fantasy and disaster tension, Ink and Bone for its book-loving alternate world, and Stillhouse Lake for the grounded fear of a woman trying to keep her children safe after public horror shatters her life.

Her earlier work under her own name is worth following too. Copper Moon brings together music, romance, and a supernatural thread in Texas, while Bridge of Shadows turns to the borderlands and the moral pressure surrounding immigration, family, and danger. Across genres, she returned again and again to ordinary people pushed into high-stress situations, especially women who have to adapt fast or lose everything.

Conrad died in Texas on November 1, 2020, after a battle with soft tissue sarcoma. She left behind a shelf that is wide, restless, and hard to box into one category. If there is a through line, it is momentum, strong emotion, and characters who keep going when stopping is not really an option.