Paraphrased from the back jacket of "The Dragon Queen":
Alice Borchardt is the sister of Ann Rice and shared her sister's childhood love of story telling.
She is a professional nurse living currently in Houston, has a profound love of little know periods of history & has authored a total of 8 novels based in those little known periods.
Quoted from Wikipedia:
Borchardt was born Alice O'Brien in New Orleans on Oct. 6, 1939. She was one of five sisters. Her father, Howard, a postal worker, helped her apply for her first library card at age 7.[1] "It was the best gift I ever received," Borchardt said in a 1999 interview with the Austin American-Statesman.[1]
Her mother, Katherine, was a feminist who taught Alice to pursue her career goals. The O'Brien family moved to Richardson, Texas, when Alice was a teenager. She began her nursing career in Houston, where she met and married her husband.[1]
Literary career:
After a 30-year career as a licensed vocational nurse, Borchardt faced staff reductions at the hospital where she worked. Rice encouraged Borchardt, helped her find an agent, and wrote introductions to several of her books.
She was in her mid 50s when the first of her seven novels,
Devoted, was published in 1995. She is perhaps best known for a trilogy about werewolves in medieval Rome.
In The Silver Wolf, Night of the Wolf and The Wolf King, the orphaned Regeane and the nobleman Maeniel, both are part werewolf and part human, contend with bullying chieftains, embattled emperors and supernatural interventions. The last book in the series was published in 2001.
On July 25, 2007, Bill Crider reported that Borchardt has died. This was confirmed by an obituary in the Houston Chronicle. In addition to her husband and Rice, who lives in Rancho Mirage, Borchardt is survived by sisters Tamara Tinker of Daly City, Calif., Karen O'Brien and Micki Jenkins of Dallas. She is also survived by two nephews, Christopher T. Rice of Los Angeles and Daniel Tinker of Oakland.