Lucy Score

Lucy Score didn't arrive at writing in a straight line. Before her first novel appeared in print, she'd worked as a yoga instructor, bartender, journalist, and marketer — a restless run of careers that, in her own words, involved getting fired more than once. It was being laid off from a newspaper job that finally pushed her towards fiction. A 35,000-word novella took a year to write and sold a grand total of 35 copies. Undeterred, she kept going.

The turning point came when two indie publishers discovered that early novella online and offered to help her turn it into a full-length novel. The result, Undercover Love, was published in March 2015. Later that same year, Pretend You're Mine hit number one on the Amazon charts, and Score became a full-time author ahead of the five-year plan she'd carefully mapped out. She's never looked back.

Raised in Pennsylvania in a literary household where reading at the dinner table was considered perfectly acceptable, Score earned a degree in journalism before her winding path to fiction. That background shows. Her dialogue is sharp and her pacing purposeful, and the characters she builds — independent women with complicated inner lives, heroes who are guarded but not irredeemable — feel grounded in something specific rather than assembled from tropes. Humour is never far from the surface, but it doesn't come at the expense of emotional honesty.

Small-town settings are the heartland of her work. The Benevolence series, which opened with Pretend You're Mine, established her signature blend of military heroes, genuine community, and romance that earns its happy ending rather than simply arriving at one. The sprawling Blue Moon series extended that world into the fictional Blue Moon Bend, New York, a town run by cheerful meddlers with a gift for matchmaking. Score also co-authored the Bootleg Springs series with Claire Kingsley, a collaboration that brought a cold-case mystery thread into the usual romantic mix.

Her best-known work, the Knockemout series, begins with Things We Never Got Over — a grumpy-sunshine story set in Knockemout, Virginia, that accumulated an extraordinary readership and cemented her place among the most-read romance authors working today. The book has been optioned for television development by Amazon MGM Studios. The two follow-up novels, Things We Hide from the Light and Things We Left Behind, continued the series with the same blend of simmering tension and community warmth that made the first book so compulsive.

Not all of Score's output follows the same template. The Riley Thorn series adds a paranormal mystery layer to the romance: its heroine is a broke divorcée with possible clairvoyant abilities who finds herself entangled with a private investigator and a string of suspicious deaths. It's lighter in tone than the premise suggests, but the series shows Score's range beyond purely contemporary territory.

In 2017, Score and her husband Tim founded their own indie imprint, That's What She Said Publishing, bringing her brother and later her sister into the business. That decision gave her creative control over a back catalogue that now spans dozens of titles, translated into more than 30 languages. Print deals followed with Bloom Books and, for UK readers, Hodder Books, alongside multiple appearances on the New York Times bestsellers list. Her most recent series, Story Lake, launched in 2025 and continues her habit of building fictional communities that readers want to return to, book after book.

Score lives in Pennsylvania with her husband and their cat, Cleo.