NEW YORK — Best-selling novelist Nora Roberts is suing a Brazilian writer for copyright infringement, alleging that Cristiane Serruya has committed “multi-plagiarism” on a “rare and scandalous” level.

In papers filed Wednesday morning in Rio de Janeiro, where Serruya lives, Roberts called Serruya’s romance books “a literary patchwork, piecing together phrases whose form portrays emotions practically identical to those expressed in the plaintiff’s books.” Citing Brazilian law, Roberts is asking for damages at 3,000 times the value of the highest sale price for any Serruya work mentioned in the lawsuit.

“If you plagiarize, I will come for you,” Roberts told The Associated Press during a recent telephone interview. “If you take my work, you will pay for it and I will do my best to see you don’t write again.”

Roberts added that she would donate any damages from the lawsuit to a literacy program in Brazil.

In a telephone interview Wednesday with the AP, Serruya called herself a “fanatic” of Roberts’ work. But she denied copying her and said she had not received notification of any lawsuit. Serruya added that she often used ghost writers for parts of her books and “could not guarantee that no part was copied” by them.

Serruya said she is using software to analyze her books.

“My books are big. In a book of 120,000 words it’s difficult to know how many supposedly came from a work of Nora Roberts,” she said.

Lawyer Saulo Daniel Lopez, a specialist in authors’ rights, said a case like this can take five to 10 years to be decided in Brazilian courts. If plagiarism is proven, Serruya could be forced to pay from the proceeds of her books, Lopez said.

“The indemnification could be high percentage wise because Roberts, a world renowned writer, could allege having suffered a lot of moral damage,” he said.

Roberts also criticized Amazon.com for not being more vigilant about the books sold on its site. Roberts and other authors have complained that Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited e-book subscription program, for which royalties are based on how many pages are read the first time the customer reads them, is an incentive for unscrupulous writers to quickly throw together material from other sources.

“Amazon didn’t find any of this,” Roberts said to the AP of Serruya’s books, noting that she had been tipped off by readers and fellow writers. “And that strikes me as a problem.”

As of earlier this week, most of Serruya’s work had been removed from Amazon, although many books remained available on Barnes & Noble.com, Google Play and elsewhere. In a recent statement to the AP, Amazon said that it takes “violations of laws and proprietary rights very seriously.”

Roberts is one of the world’s most popular and prolific authors, with hundreds of millions of copies sold worldwide. She was initially known for romance books, but also writes mainstream fiction and publishes crime novels under the penname J.D. Robb. On her blog, Roberts has repeatedly attacked Serruya and strongly hinted that she would sue.

“She’s a blood leech sucking on the body of the writing profession,” Roberts wrote last weekend. “Arranging for a truckload of salt to dispense with her has been taking up a lot of my time, energies, sanity. Hopefully, once that’s in place the frustrating and infuriating distraction of her will fade, at least a bit.”

On her web site (crisserruya.com), Serruya is described as a late bloomer, having worked as a lawyer for more than 20 years before she “decided to give writing a go.”

“And — amazingly — it was just the piece that was missing from the puzzle of her life,” her biography reads. “Now that she’s hooked, she can’t free herself — and doesn’t want to be freed.”

Roberts has taken legal action before. In 1997, she sued the popular romance writer Janet Dailey.

Dailey, saying she under “immense stress” because of her husband’s health problems, acknowledged that her novels “Aspen Gold” and “Notorious” included ideas and passages from Roberts’ books.

The case was settled out of court and Roberts donated the damages awarded to Literacy Volunteers of America, now ProLiteracy.

Marcelo Silva de Sousa in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.