I began a lifelong love of reading before kindergarten. My earliest memories include going to the library or bookmobile and bringing home a box of books…every week. I was raised on Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Wizard of Oz, Black Beauty, and other works of mystery and wonder. Not surprising I would work to solve mysteries and answer questions in my own writing. My connection to words led to a career in public relations and marketing. Armed with degrees in communication, business and library science, I held senior management positions in higher education, winning numerous local, regional and national marketing awards while working at both the University of Houston and Texas Southern University. After forty years writing non-fiction, including a 175-page history of the University of Houston, I retired and finally turned to creating fictional worlds. With the help of a Writer’s League of Texas five-day retreat and the eighteen-month long Online Certificate in Novel Writing program at Stanford University, I embraced both retirement and novel writing. The result of which is The Broken Hallelujah, which has been awarded the 2023 IPPY Bronze Medal for wartime fiction from the Independent Publishers Book Awards and was a finalist for the Page Turner Award and the International Book Award. The audiobook just launched on Amazon on Veterans Day. When I’m not slaving over my computer, I spend time in my backyard garden and with my crazy fur babies, Jade, my yappy but huggable white schnauzer, and her best friend, Yara, a gorgeous and unflappable Russian blue feline. Currently, I’m working on a new mystery series: The Brentwood Women Mysteries. The first is set at a university…involving three generations of strong women determined to clear a friend of a murder/suicide charge. I’m have a great time sending up some favorite academic places and people in my fictitious university. My forty years in academe opened many doors, introduced me to an amazing variety of characters, took me around the world from Houston to Alaska and Nigeria to Beijing, and offered many an outrageous tale to provide a plethora of plots. Deliver Us From Evil...and the Six O'Clock News is now available on Amazon. The second book in the series, Deadly as a Walk in the Park, has the matriarch of the family searching for a hit and run killer who just murdered a friend and might have also murdered her husband twenty years ago. This book will be available for pre-order on January 16, 2024. I am just starting the final in this first series, Murder From Time to Time. The pregnant granddaughter Grace is bed-bound and decides to try to solve the murder of her great-great grandmother, an investigative reporter like Nellie Bly in Houston in the 1920s.Include your email in the feedback section if you are interested in hearing news about this and future books. Until then, I wish you good times and good reading. Read more about this authorRead less about this author