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.