Elizabeth Moon

Award winning Sci Fi and Fantasy author from Texas. Read about her on Wikipedia and her official website.

Her works include:
 * The Deed of Paksenarrion trilogy. Young Paks, a woman and sheep farmer's daughter, runs away from an Arranged Marriage proposal to join a mercenary army and over the course of events sets her sights on becoming a Paladin of Saint Gird. As a side effect, she gains some very nasty enemies.
 * The Legacy Of Gird books, a prequel series to The Deed of Paksenarrion following the adventure of the legendary hero Gird.
 * a followup series of a projected five books, starting with Oath of Fealty, which picks up literally minutes from where the Deed ended, but written 22 years later.
 * The Familias Regnant 'verse of Space Opera novels.
 * Vatta's War series (called Vattan Saga in the United Kingdom): More space opera. Kylara Vatta gets forced out of her naval academy for a scandal she accidentally helped create. Her family run a powerfull interstellar trading business and she's sent to captain a outdated trade ship to a planet where it's to be sold for scrap, not quite aware that it's a Secret Test of Character from her father and his brother to see how she'll rise up to danger, inititive and hold up in the family business. They get more danger than they bargained for however, as a criminal conspiracy threatens to violently bring down the corporate structures that space currently relies on... including the Vatta family.
 * Remnant Population: Standalone novel: A colony is ordered to be abandoned when the parent corporation loses contact with it, but one woman, Ofelia, makes sure she gets left behind. Just when she's getting used to solitude she discovers that the planet isn't so devoid of intelligent life as first thought... Nominated for the 1997 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
 * The Speed Of Dark: Something Completely Different for Moon, a novel set Twenty Minutes Into the Future, on Earth, about an autistic computer programmer. In between the usual life struggles, he and his autistic co-workers are under pressure from their employer to undergo an experimental procedure that might make them "normal", and not everyone can understand why they might not want that. Winner, 2003 Nebula Award for Best Novel and nominated for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.
 * The Pirate Planets series, co-written with Anne McCaffrey

Nearly all of Moon's books share the following tropes:
 * Action Girl: The main character of all her books except The Speed of Dark, Remnant Population and The Legacy of Gird.
 * Military and Warfare Tropes: Several of them. Moon was in the U.S. Marine Corps during the 1960s.
 * No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: At some point, each of Moon's Action Girl heroines will do or already has done something she meant well or actually did well and suffer for it.
 * Space Is an Ocean: All the Space Opera books. See "Marine Corps".