As soon as I was old enough to hold a pencil, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I've been lucky-I've always earned my living that way. As a feature writer, I covered fields as varied as artificial intelligence, the arts, the environment, and international affairs and traveled on assignment to exotic locales as diverse as Ecuador, Sri Lanka, and Texarkana, Texas. Several of my feature stories won national and regional awards. Now my job is writing fiction and screenplays.
My first thriller, The Quetzal's Tale, made the British Crime Writers Debut Dagger short list. Quetzal is the story of Peace Corps volunteer Lucy Claiborne, who hunts her mentor's killer in the wilds of highland Guatemala. The germ of the idea for TQT came to me when I was covering humanitarian aid projects in Bolivia. At a remote health clinic in the Altiplano, the staff thrust me and my camera into the delivery room as a woman was giving birth. Her baby and this book were born on that day.
My historical mystery thriller, Fortune's Fool, was a 2010 Golden Heart® finalist. It's about a 1930s Memphis socialite whose husband dies and leaves her penniless. To support herself and the members of her household who depend on her, she becomes a society fortune teller, only to discover that she has the true sight. Fool is now available as an ebook on Amazon and Barnes & Noble.
I may have been born in a U.S. Army hospital on the outskirts of Orleans, France, but I was made in Tennessee and count myself an 8th generation Tennessean. My father taught at a U.S. Defense Department school in France, and my physician mother worked as a civilian doctor for the army. After a stint in Germany, my family came home to Tennessee when I was three. I grew up there with a brother and sister and lots of dogs, cats, horses, geese, ducks, and the occasional goat and peacock. No pigs, though. Daddy hated them.
Although I'm the spawn of generations of small-town dwellers and grew up in small towns myself, at heart I'm a city girl. I've lived in Nashville, Dallas, Paris (France), Washington, D.C., and Austin, Texas. Now, I've come back to Nashville and home to my Tennessee roots.
