Cassie Edwards

Cassie Edwards, "the world's most successful author of American Indian historical romance novels, with more than 10 million copies of her 99 books in print" (Leonards, Telegraph) became embroiled in a controversy about plagiarism when, on Monday 7 January 2008 the romance review and comment blog Smart Bitches who Love Trashy Books reported that they had found passages in a number of Cassie Edwards's novels which bore striking similarities (in some cases whole phrases which were identical) to passages in published works of non-fiction. The news was picked up by Hillel Italie, of the Associated Press, who spoke to Edwards:

"A popular U.S. romance novelist alleged to have lifted work from other texts acknowledged she sometimes "takes" her material "from reference books" but added she didn't know she was supposed to credit her sources." (9 January 2008)

Italie followed this up with further reports on the 10th of January (which includes comments from Nora Roberts) and the 11th of January as further details emerged and as Signet, one of Cassie Edwards's publishers, reviewed its position. On the 12th of January reports about the allegations appeared in the New York Times and the Telegraph. Paul Tolme, author of an article about black-footed ferrets, some of the text of which found its way into Cassie Edwards' Shadow Bear, wrote an article for Newsweek (15th of January 2008) in which he describes the context in which his text makes its appearance in Edwards' novel, and takes the opportunity to give the reader further information about black-footed ferrets.