I live in Sequim, Washington, with my husband, Bill, and a sweet-natured mutt, Laddie. Well, Bill is sweet-natured, too. After he retired from a long career as an analytical chemist at Los Alamos National Laboratory, I talked him into moving from northern New Mexico to the home of my heart, western Washington.

      I was born in Bremerton, but I had to move to a military post near Las Cruces, NM, when I was six. My father had been seriously injured while working on Ross Dam in Washington, and although he recovered to some degree (after many surgeries), he couldn't work in such a damp climate. So -- I was dragged from beautiful, green Washington to a desiccated land of goatheads, cactus, tarantulas and rattlesnakes. (On my first day in the trailer park at what was then White Sands Proving Ground, I went outside barefoot.)

      I earned a B.A. in English from New Mexico State University and got married (to someone else -- Bill came later.) and raised three daughters. I've lived in Fort Worth, Texas; Dearborn, Michigan; and Las Vegas, Nevada. I lived in Los Alamos, NM, too.

      Sequim is on the north shore of the Olympic Peninsula and is in the "rainshadow" of the Olympic Mountains. Average rainfall here is about 10 inches. Our house is one-half mile from the shore of Dungeness Bay, which is walled off from the Strait of Juan de Fuca by a natural sand spit. Dungeness Spit is five miles long and on its eastern end is the New Dungeness Lighthouse. From our dining room we see the San Juan Islands and in the winter when the air is very clear we can see the snow-covered peaks of Canada's Coast Mountains beyond the islands. Twenty miles across the Strait, north by northwest, is Victoria, B.C. On our deck we can turn and look due east toward Whidbey Island and farther to the beautiful, glacier-covered Mt. Baker. Baker is the northernmost (in the U.S.) of the chain of volcanoes that dot the west coast: Baker, Rainier, Adams, St. Helens, Hood, Shasta, Lassen.

      My writing background: I wrote plays when my kids were small. A few of them were published and I made money (in the mid double digits). I started in journalism by freelancing for newspapers in Las Vegas, Nevada. When I wrote a series about the old families of Vegas in a six-month celebration of the city's 75th anniversary, I interviewed dozens and dozens of people. One who stayed in my mind was an old lady who told me ribald tales of her glory days in wild Las Vegas. Her family didn't want her to talk to me or, failing that, they hoped I'd think she was making it up. (I believed every word!) The seed was planted that bloomed in my 4th mystery. In Vegas Centennial, a writer gets enmeshed in a murder case while writing the memoirs of a Vegas pioneer.

      I moved to Los Alamos in 1987 and worked as Lifestyles Editor for the local paper. A lot of that experience is in my first and third mysteries. The heroine of A Spy Within and Lost Almost is a reporter for the Los Alamos paper. After a few years at the paper, I quit and did some work for magazines, including two features for The Reader's Digest. But my heart is in fiction.

      My first romance novel, Love with a Welcome Stranger, will be published by The Wild Rose Press in the summer of 2008. I'll post updates here as that event gets closer.