My folks are North Carolinians but lived in West Virginia long enough to have me and my sister while our preacher dad served coal field churches.

I decided in ninth grade to become a writer and headed to Vassar College for their creative writing program. After college I returned to my folks, who by then were living in Miami, and got a job to earn money for a serious test of my writing commitment. With $750, one suitcase, two coats and a portable typewriter, I headed to a Scottish Highland village where I didn't know a soul, to see if I had the self-discipline to write without professors setting a deadline and if I had anything to say without professors assigning me a topic. Before my money ran out the following April, I had sold one poem, one article, one short story, and a one-act play. Fortified by that major impact on British literature, I moved to Atlanta and started a series of writing-related jobs. In the following years I wrote for religious magazines like Guideposts and also wrote a good bit of educational materials on the subject of hunger. But no matter what I was writing, I was reading mysteries.

One day my husband looked over our budget and demanded, "Why don’t you write a mystery to pay for all the ones you buy?" I immediately knew what I wanted to write though my first mystery, MURDER AT MARKHAM (reissued by Silver Dagger in 2001), took thirteen years to complete.

Since 1988 I have written twenty mysteries, four novels, and five non-fiction books. I am grateful to readers for letting me do what I enjoy most in the world. [Some people contend that writing is not a profession, it's an obsession. They’re right, as my two sons can attest. How many evenings did they stand in my office door asking, "Are we EVER going to eat?”][ Thanks, if you are one of the readers who keeps my fingers on the keys.

When I’m not writing, I work to improve the lives of children, particularly foster children, and serve as an elder in my local congregation. I also plant and replant flowers and shrubs in my yard. But my favorite hobbies are reading and doing nothing.

The rest of what you want to know, you’ll find in my books. The people are different, but the basic stories are true. I always figure why make up anything I can remember instead?

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