Readers of her three popular Napa Valley mystery novels know her as Nadia Gordon. The book jacket photos show a stylish young woman with a model's cheekbones in a fanciful feathered scarf.

Fans of her projects celebrating the ancient guide to all things sensual, "The Kama Sutra," know her as Julianne Balmain. The accompanying illustrations show a woman, who bears a striking resemblance to the one on the mystery novels, athletically coupled with an exotic male partner.

"It's still a little odd," admitted the Richmond-based writer of her double literary life. "But Nadia has a life of her own and we get along well. She gets mail and the occasional phone call. Julianne's interests are disparate and wide-ranging, which can get overwhelming. Nadia is very focused. We don't have to sit around for a year wondering what Nadia wants to write. She wants to write a mystery novel set in the wine country."

So who is who? Turns out the name on her birth certificate is Julianne Balmain, while the Nadia Gordon name on her crime novels is a tribute to her grandmother. And no, she swears none of this is evidence of an identity crisis.

Napa readers will have a chance to meet Balmain, who will be wearing her Nadia Gordon hat, when she comes to Napa's Copperfield's Books in the Bel Aire Plaza on April 20, at 7 p.m. for a reading and book-signing appearance.

Confused? You won't be if you read her work. The split in Balmain and "Gordon's" books could not be more evident.

Her Napa Valley crime-solving heroine, Sunny McCloskey, is a scrappy, lively chef from St. Helena who could probably run her organic restaurant successfully and find the right guy if only she'd stop running into dead bodies. The reader looking for any serious ooh-la-la has to wait for a brief, lyrical passage in the second book in the series, "Murder by the Glass," when Sunny first spends the night with her new found crush, a man's-man chef named Andre Morales. Otherwise the books focus on great food, friendships, dating woes and murder.

Balmain's Kama Sutra projects, meanwhile, offer an explicit and unwaveringly enthusiastic voice for all things sexual. Her book, "Office Kama Sutra: Being a Guide to Delectation & Delight in the Workplace," is a guide to making one's cubicle a lot less lonely, including suggesting the erotic possibilities brought into one's life by bike messengers, temps and business consultants. It's a refreshingly impolitic take on how sexuality can make its spritely way into the sterile landscape of the American office.

Her books set in Napa Valley are "Sharpshooter," "Death by the Glass" and "Murder Alfresco," with more to come. As a local, part of the fun of reading this series is exploring a fictional version of places that are familiar. During the course of these books Sunny goes to the farmer's market in St. Helena, drives down Highway 29 to question a suspect at a winery in Mount Veeder or drives twisty back roads to visit her friend Wade Scord at his zinfandel winery on Howell Mountain.

Then there's the inherent guessing game. Is there any way that that comfy bakery called Bismark's in St. Helena isn't Model Bakery? Less certain are places such as Vinifera, the restaurant near Yountville that figures large in "Murder by the Glass." Brix seems like a lock, though, Balmain says no.

"A lot of people thought they recognized Sunny's boyfriend, chef Andre Morales. But he is his own man. If anything, he is an amalgam of attributes drawn from various crushes I've had over the years," said Balmain.

Balmain says the tenor of her various projects are less disparate than they might at first seem.

"The thing that connects all of my work is pleasure," said Balmain. "In the novels with Sunny pleasure is in going to a farmer's market and finding amazing greens and tomatoes and aromatic herbs and also meeting a good-looking winemaker in an old sweater. In the Kama Sutra projects, I'm writing more directly about incorporating erotic pleasure into every aspect of life."

The kind of sensual pleasure she writes of today may have seemed a world away in Balmain's early life. She grew up near Colfax, a small Sierra foothills community, where her father was a logger.

"Our nearest neighbor was, and still is, half a mile away on a dirt road. So it was a woodsy upbringing. I spent a good portion of my summer vacations on logging jobs in the Sierras, which was actually pretty fun and occasionally hair raising," she said.

After high school she attended UC Berkeley, majoring in English literature. As if the change from Colfax to the Bay Area wasn't enough, Balmain trekked off for a year in Paris where she picked up work as a model and quickly discovered a whole new world of food, wine and more.

"I enjoyed an elaborate social life that included almost daily meals at the best restaurants in Paris which, ironically, probably helped end my modeling career. I never could shed that last five pounds," she said. "I drank marvelous 50-year-old Bordeaux wines, discovered cheese, nibbled steak au poivre, and on and on. The outdoor markets of Paris, the boulangeries, the cheeses, the overall approach to food: it was a great awakening of the senses."

Today, Balmain has found a new focus raising her son, Ivan, who's just over a year old. Being a parent is bringing changes to her work and life.

"For the moment, it's made it harder to write, both because I have much less time to devote to my own thoughts and creativity, and because I'm less interested in spending my days in an imaginary world," she says. "With a child running around, the appeal of fictional characters diminishes. Who needs Sunny when I can watch Ivan all day?"

Even so, Balmain or, rather, Gordon, is hard at work on book four in her Napa Valley series, although even she isn't certain what will happen to the irrepressible Sunny.

"Romantically, it looks like Sunny may be in for a rough patch," she says. "Other than that, her astrologist knows as much as I do. I'd like to see her get a real vacation one of these days. I think she would enjoy Sicily."