Sandra Lynn Brown, née Cox, was born on March 12, 1948, in Waco, Texas and raised in Ft. Worth. As the oldest of five daughters, she was a responsible and mature girl, always opting to read books rather than play with dolls. Sandra graduated from Texas Christian University with a degree in English. After graduating, she worked as a contributing feature reporter at the nationally syndicated PM Magazine in Dallas. When the show experienced mass layoffs, Sandra found herself out of work.

Sandra married Michael Brown, former television anchorman and award-winning documentarian. Together, they had two children, Rachel and Ryan. Encouraged by her husband, Sandra ventured into fiction writing while their children were at school. She sold her first novel, Love's Encore, under the pen name Rachel Ryan, within a year. She also wrote as Laura Jordan and Erin St. Claire.

Since the publication of her first novel in 1981, Sandra has penned over seventy novels, with more than sixty appearing on the New York Times bestseller list. Her books have sold over eighty million copies worldwide and have been translated into more than thirty languages. Notably, her novel "French Silk" was adapted into an ABC-TV movie in 1992.