About Me

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 to places as diverse as Asia, Latin America, 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. It’s 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 on assignment 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 latest manuscript, FORTUNE’S FOOL, was a 2010 Golden Heart® Finalist! It’s a mystery-thriller 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.

Now, I have a romantic comedy script under my belt as well. “Package Deal” (originally titled “The Blue Jay’s Egg”) is about a career-obsessed architect who never, ever wants children and fights falling in love with sexy, successful artist client who is the widower father of five. “Package Deal” won the RWA Scriptscene chapter’s 2010 Romancing the Script competition.

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), and Washington, D.C. In April of 2000, I moved to Austin, where I met my brilliant, handsome trophy husband. He was a package deal (remind you of anything?), and I now have four stepchildren and four cats. We used to have a fish named Seamus, too, but he has gone to that big fishbowl in the sky.