First I was a reader.

One blessing of my childhood was being taken to the library on a regular basis. It was an immensely impressive Carnegie library with wide concrete steps leading up to polished wooden doors set between soaring columns. Treasures awaited inside.

Each gleaming table held a vintage stereopticon, a 3D viewer complete with cards featuring famous people and events from years ago. Those, and the wall murals and sculpted busts on plinths, held my attention for a bit, but the main attraction was the books. To my young eye, miles and miles of books, books that held stories I could get lost in for hours.

Reading was my saving grace. The escape from a household racked with abuse and mental illness.

I blew through the children’s section by the time I turned nine. The librarian at the big front desk didn’t want to let me check out my first Agatha Christie mystery, but somehow I convinced her. I was hooked. Though I lived in Louisville, a Kentucky city that can’t quite decide if it’s Midwestern or Southern, the resolution of crimes committed in that structured British society resonated. Perhaps it was the puzzles that could be solved if you were clever enough to spot the clues. Or justice always prevailing and returning a fractured community to its previous calm state.

As the years rolled on traditional, fair-play mysteries remained my first choice, but I also explored darker literary paths. Gothic thrillers. How I loved du Maurier’s Rebecca! Horror. Thank you, Stephen King for your prolific career—I’ve read them all. Never did I imagine that I could write such books that would grace library shelves or whisk through the air to an eReader.

Now I am a writer.

It didn’t happen overnight. It took years of studying history, medicine, and psychiatry before I developed the confidence to put metaphorical pen to paper. Does my clinical experience influence my writing? Of course.

My historical mysteries feature a unique sleuth, Tito Amato, a celebrated castrato singer with a warm heart and a passion for justice. While mixing murder, music, and intrigue against the dazzling backdrop of 18th-century Venice. the series also explores Tito’s emotional journey as he seeks to find self-acceptance in a world that considers him a marginalized character due to the violent surgery that created his magnificent soprano voice. The six-book series, which has been described as “the best kind of historical mystery—smart, learned, bristling with period detail, but also full of engaging and lively characters and a compelling plot,” is published by Poisoned Pen Press, an imprint of Sourcebooks.

Short fiction allows me a wider range of settings and characters to have fun with. I’ve published stories set in a dystopian future, created a hellbound P.I. with Satan as a client, and peppered crime stories with variations of the patients I used to treat. My ideas generally begin when I come across an interesting character facing a challenging situation. How the character reacts moves the plot forward. My stories have appeared in major magazines and anthologies and been nominated for the Macavity and Derringer awards.

I am still a reader

You are, too.