About Me

When I was a child in Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley, my dad’s “workroom” was in the den in the center of the house directly across from the front door. I remember hanging around on the floor below his drawing table while he worked, sneaking an art pencil and writing. Dad did both commercial and fine art and came from a family of artists, but from an early age I knew I was a writer.

I fell in love with mysteries in elementary school and began to write them, even from the beginning seeing them as novels rather than short stories. At UCLA, I perplexed my counselors and professors alike by adding a second major in geography to my first major in English. The combination made perfect sense to me, English to study other writers, geography because I saw place as an important element in my writing.

But then I married and we began to move with my husband’s job, and I learned another meaning to” place” as I tried to find mine in each new city. I joined the American Association of University Women and I sought out writing groups. I wrote for arts magazines and volunteer publications in Portland, Oregon, Shawnee-Mission, Kansas, Orange County, California, and finally Sacramento. I wrote stories to fit the places where we lived and I collected characters and stories and searched for places where they could belong. In 1988, I became an early member of Sisters in Crime, and I have been a member of three chapters since then. I am a past chapter president in Sacramento.

In Sacramento, at last, I found a home for a story I’d been gathering since college, and I wrote my first novel that was not a conventional mystery, Flint House. Through Sisters in Crime, I found Bridle Path Press and Flint House became my first published novel. I was very pleased to use a bit of my dad’s art on the cover. I hope to write another novel with journalist Liz Cane.

I enjoy both writing and editing, and have written for and co-edited two anthologies published by Capitol Crimes, the Sacramento Chapter of Sisters in Crime. My husband, Jeff S. Asay, is a railroad historian who has produced numerous articles on western railroads and two comprehensive histories of Union Pacific. Life revolves around writing, reading, friends, and family, amid the beauty of Northern California. 

I did an interview on Capitol Public Radio in Sacramento, October 22, 2014. You can listen to it here:

http://www.capradio.org/news/insight/2014/10/22/insight-102214c/