I write character-driven mysteries. About people with dreams and with flaws, thrown into extraordinary circumstances. Or thrown in with people completely different than themselves. I love seeing people change through the course of a story. I especially like when that happens when they take on a mystery to solve!

Character arcs are my jam.

I live and write in San Jose, California, heart of the Silicon Valley.. What interests me about where I live is not the technology, but the people.
I write about people who have come here from all over the world to create tech. I write about the people not in tech–service workers, law enforcement and educators–who are struggling to hang on in a place where the cost of living is set by tech wages.
In my Laughing Loaf cozy series, my protagonist, Gracie Markley, is a former tech manager who’s been relocated by witness protection from Seattle after turning in her husband for selling tech secrets. She vows not to return to the tech industry and instead, starts her own bakery in the Santa Cruz Mountains, about thirty miles from Silicon Valley.

I have done this–in fact, my bakery was actually called The Laughing Loaf. My husband is NOT a tech spy, however!

I still love baking bread. But unlike Gracie’s bakery, mine made little money. So I began teaching high school English and fell in love with it. In the process, I’ve learned a lot about what makes a good story.

And about the power of stories to inspire and change us.