I've been a partner in a law firm that specialized in complex civil litigation, representing folks who'd been seriously injured. So I know the inside of a courtroom and what goes into assessing a case. I'm a member of the South Carolina Bar, and I've taught law to business students for twenty years. I figure it's better to show folks how to avoid trouble rather than fish them out of it after the fact.

I also serve on the Board of Directors for the Forensic Medicine Program, an innovative collaboration of agencies in Charlotte-Mecklenburg: police, fire, medic, crime lab, medical examiner, educational facilities, hospital emergency and surgical facilities, and district attorney's office. One goal of the program is to train and standardize evidence collection procedures by first responders.

I've read mysteries since Santa Claus first delivered Nancy Drew and Trixie Belden to my house. We didn't have a bookstore in the town where I lived, but we had a fantastic library — right at the bottom of my driveway! Mysteries have always been the staples in my reading diet.

I enjoy writing mysteries for the same reasons I enjoy reading them: they are intellectual puzzles, requiring that my mind be engaged. They take me to other locales, both strange and familiar. I can revisit characters who've become like friends and watch them grow and change over time.

Murder mysteries are the classic battle between good and evil — and they reassure us that good can triumph. They are the hero's journey into an unknown realm, where she then re-emerges with the solution or potion or secret, bringing with her new insights, new understandings. The best modern mysteries have become increasingly complex: they engage the moral ambiguities of our society and help us sort those out. This is certainly a time when we need help believing that good triumphs — and that we know what good is.

First, I hope readers enjoy a good laugh, the welcome embrace of people they'll enjoy seeing again, and a puzzle that intrigues and satisfies. I'd also like to introduce them to my part of the country, which has often been awkwardly stereotyped by movies and television. And I'd like to leave them with something intellectually satisfying, something that makes them look, for instance, at lawyers or environmental polluters or themselves in ways they haven't before.

I like both humor and substance in the books I read; I aim for the same in what I write. Mysteries should first entertain. But mystery readers also tend to be intelligent and curious, so they demand well-drawn backdrops and knotty problems. I like solid research, a sense the writer knows whereof she writes. Like many Southerners, I grew up in a storytelling family, full of laughter. Ideally, I'd like to be "Carl Hiaasen meets Margaret Maron."

I grew up in Walhalla, South Carolina, in the northwest corner of South Carolina, near the borders with Georgia and North Carolina. This locale, which is itself a character in my stories, is where my family has lived for 300 years (not in Charlotte, North Carolina, as the book jacket mistakenly says). It's unlike the rest of the state of South Carolina — more hilly, more like western North Carolina than it is like the "flatlands" in the lower part of the state. When people ask, "Where did you grow up?" I usually answer "Near where they filmed the movie Deliverance" (on the Chattooga River, pictured on the website banner). People don't usually ask any more questions after that.