The "magic" of the artist?

I started yesterday reading a book by Danielle Steel, "The numbers game", and I am completely hooked. I have already read half of it. It has been a while since I got so hooked on a non-fiction book. The funny thing is that the topic of the novel is not one of my favourites, it could even be argued that it is a stereotyped story - or, that the same story has been told a thousand times already -, sometimes I even can expect what is going to happen (actually, it is written in the first page of the book), and, nevertheless, despite all this, somehow the author keeps me hooked and wondering "and then, what happens?"

Literally, she took one of the stories that I would have considered a priori among the most uninteresting ones (for my personal taste) and completely took me in. How does she do it???