I grew up in the Midwest. I was the kind of little girl who would stay up too late, with a flashlight, to finish the last pages of any book I loved. I carted home a dozen books at a time from our public library, read them all, and wrote my first story at ten. Years later, after graduating from the University of San Diego School of Law, I worked for two years as a federal public defender in New York City. I left Manhattan with the idea for a children's book, which became my first novel for young readers, SEAL CHILD. I wrote SEAL CHILD in three months, on Cape Cod, where I could walk to the ocean every day even though it was the middle of winter. I saw my first seals off the coast of Chatham Bay in Massachusetts, and the following year, traveled to the Galapagos Islands where I saw seals, sea lions, and penguins. The baby seal you see in this picture was so tame she grabbed hold of one of my shoelaces and untied it, just as this photograph was snapped. While I sent my manuscript out to children's publishing houses, I taught Legal Writing at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts. Three years later, I began practicing law as an attorney for the Department of Environmental Protection in Massachusetts, where I remained for the next six years. SEAL CHILD was published by Morrow Junior Books in 1989. My second novel, KELSEY'S RAVEN, was published in 1992. My new novel-in-progress is called: The Kingdom of Tigers. It is the story of two sisters who solve a mystery, and it is set on a tiger preserve in India. In 1995, I was able to travel to India to explore the tiger preserves in Rajastan. There, I was fortunate enough to see a mother tiger and two cubs in the wild. I, myself, have a young son named William, and I write whenever I can.