I grew up on a farm in Ontario, moving to a small town when I was eleven. I discovered the town’s library and proceeded to clean it out. Adventure and suspense fiction were my favorites. Writing is something I always thought about , and came much later when I believed I had a story to tell.

My university credentials are in engineering and economics. My professional working life has been spent toiling on energy and environmental projects, mostly in Canada but also internationally. In the 1980s and 1990s I had a series of assignments in Chile. The setting and plot for The Uttermost Place draws on my experiences in Chile, and a forestry project of a Chilean friend.

You may wonder why an energy and environmental person writes using mining and forestry as a background for a novel. I started out in university to be a geologist and spent a summer tramping Northern Ontario with a geologist’s hammer in my hand before working underground for a summer in a copper mine in Quebec. I guess I’m leading an alternative-life-not-traveled in my writing. Still, on the knowledge side of the ledger, one absorbs a lot about mining and forestry as an economist in British Columbia.

I have been a member of a mystery writers’ group for about 15 years. I owe a debt of gratitude to the three women of the group (Roberta Rich, Sharon Rowse and Clara Lewis). Roberta (The Midwife of Venice: www.robertarich.com) and Sharon (The Silk Train Murder and the Barbara O’Grady mystery series: www.sharonrowse.com) are published authors. I recommend them to you.

I believe readers want a story that takes them somewhere interesting with characters they care about; they don’t want technical detail and a whole lot of business mumbo-jumbo. I hope I have achieved a balance where the reader has just enough technical information presented in layman’s terms to frame a story that flows seamlessly.