Keeping tabs on authors in LINKcat: Judith Michael

 

Source:  South Central Library System LINKcat online public access catalog

New York Times, 5/13/2026

Alex Williams reports:

 Judith Barnard, a freelance writer who stumbled on a second career as a best-selling author at 50, when she teamed with her husband, Michael Fain, a onetime aerospace engineer, to publish a potboiler novel under the pen name Judith Michael, died on May 6 in Chicago. She was 94. 

Her death, at a hospital near her home, was caused by heart failure, her daughter, Cynthia Barnard, said. 

Combining their first names to create the pseudonym Judith Michael, the couple published 11 commercially successful novels over the years, starting with “Deceptions,” an out-of-nowhere hit, in 1982. 

Equal parts romance and thriller, “Deceptions” concerned identical twin sisters — Sabrina, a globe-trotting socialite living in London, and Stephanie, a suburban Illinois housewife — whose fleeting experiment with swapping lives proved to be less fleeting than expected. 

Entertaining, yes. A Kirkus review called it “a strenuously inventive, big-budget” romance. High literature? Not so much. 

The same review described the book as “glossily seamless nonsense” but noted its potential as fodder for a TV movie — an observation that proved prescient when NBC adapted it in 1985 as a two-part mini-series with Stefanie Powers, of “Hart to Hart” fame, playing the twins.

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