I am the award-winning author of 13 crime novels. My first book in the Annie Seymour mystery series, SACRED COWS, won the Sara Ann Freed Memorial Award for best debut mystery from Time Warner/Mysterious Press. And the fourth in that series, SHOT GIRL, was a Shamus Award finalist. I wrote four books in the Tattoo Shop Mystery Series and four Black Hat Thrillers, which feature a woman computer hacker on the run.

An Inconvenient Wife is a modern retelling of Henry VIII and his wives—as a crime novel.

I have lived in Connecticut most of my life, except for four years at Roanoke College in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia and two years in Miami working for an advertising agency and then rewriting policies and procedures for an international securities and investigation company. I left Florida because I couldn’t afford a car with air conditioning.

I was an English major in college, reading a lot of dead white male British authors, and wanted to be a writer, but figured I should make a living first. I began working for a small weekly newspaper and discovered that my salary made me eligible for food stamps. I hopped from small paper to small paper until I realized I could finally support myself as a night-time copy editor at a mid-sized paper.

Working nights wasn’t so bad, and in between watching old reruns of ER at 3 a.m., I began writing novels. A friend had given me a mystery novel to read over vacation and I realized that the contemporary woman private eye/detective was exactly the kind of character I wanted to create. My first attempt had a plot that involved groundwater pollution. I had spent too much time at Planning and Zoning meetings as a reporter. But my second book turned into Sacred Cows, with the tough-talking police reporter Annie Seymour as my main character.

In 2006, I ditched newspapers and ended up at Yale, first editing a medical journal and then moving to the acquisitions department at Yale University Press. I retired in fall 2021, and while I’m still doing some freelance editing, I now have the luxury of writing without a day job.