Joan Francis is a licensed private investigator and owner of Francis Pacific Investigations. She has also worked as a newspaper reporter and is author of previous Diana Hunter thrillers, Old Poison and Silent Coup. She spent her childhood in small mining towns and camps in the western United States and in South America with her family and mining engineer father. Moving from place to place, she attended fifteen schools before graduating with a B.A. in history from the University of Washington in Seattle. Married with three grown children, she and her husband now live in a secluded valley of the Tehachapi Mountains in California.