Then Came the Summer of Love and the Days of Rage
In 1966 I left for Stanford University. Heady experience, being so near San Francisco in the late sixties. I took creative writing courses at Stanford but ran out of stories I thought worth telling. I was bound for Harvard Law School when I got diverted by an ex-Marine just returned from Vietnam. We got married.

Woman Truck Driver
From 1971 until 1975 we were long-haul truckers for North American Van Lines, one of the first husband-wife teams in their Electronics and Exhibits Division. During those four years I traveled 450,000 miles in forty-eight states and Canada. I can still talk about Detroit Diesel engines and Spicer 10-speed transmissions and I've seen as much of the USA as you can from the interstate highway system.

Beef Farmer and Youth Worker
In 1976, I settled on a hundred-acre farm in Starks, Maine and started raising Black Angus beef. No money in that, so I got a job in a private non-profit agency working with delinquent kids.

My First Spy
After I earned my masters degree in Public Administration from the University of Maine, I took over as Executive Director of the youth-serving agency where I'd started as a counselor. Our most notorious client was Michael Lance Walker. I designed the alternative educational program that kept him from dropping out of high school. This came to haunt me five years later at the tail end of the Cold War, when I was serving in Warsaw, only one hundred miles west of the Soviet border. By then, Michael had used his high school diploma to enlist in the Navy. He joined his father John Walker's spy ring and stole more than fifteen hundred classified documents detailing precisely how the U.S. planned to react to specific emergencies and exposing previously hidden vulnerabilities. If the Cold War had turned hot while I was in Poland, the Soviet Union would have had a tactical advantage. My interest in treason dates back to Michael.

Terror, First-Hand
I left Maine and my first marriage in 1981 and joined the Foreign Service of the United States, the overseas arm of the State Department. I volunteered to go to San Salvador and served in the American Embassy there, first as a vice-consul, later as the commercial officer. I danced with Navy Commander Al Schauffelberger at my thirty-fifth birthday party. Four days later a guerrilla terrorist blew Al's head off. My interest in counterterrorism starts with Al.

Poland and Denmark
From 1984-86, I was the personnel officer at our embassy in Poland. I met and married Mogens Pedersen, a Captain in the Royal Danish Army who was serving as assistant military attaché at the Danish embassy. We conceived our first child in Warsaw. I was four months pregnant when Chernobyl exploded and I went on maternity leave to Denmark for the next year. Our first son Per was born in Denmark.

Back in the USA (For a while)
In 1987 I returned to the U.S. to work in the State Department's Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs. Our second son Christian arrived in 1988. The next year I resigned from the Foreign Service; we moved to Oregon in 1990. Our daughter, Margrethe, joined us in 1991. Her delivery took place in the same hospital where I'd been born forty-two years earlier. My husband is a Danish citizen and our three children hold dual Danish and American citizenship. Margrethe is named for the current Danish monarch, Queen Margrethe II. Christian is named for half of the kings of Denmark (the rest of them are named Frederick, like the current crown prince). Per is named for his grandfather, the former blacksmith for his Danish village. In 2001, we returned to Denmark so our three kids could experience their Danish heritage. We are now living in Copenhagen, not too far from the Little Mermaid.

How I Got Started Writing

I took writing classes at the local community college and joined New Writers of the Purple Page in 1992. I placed a few stories in small-circulation magazines while I worked on longer pieces. I won the Pacific Northwest Writers Conference prize for genre novels in 1995 and sold my first two novels to Avon Books in 1996. In 2001, Time Warner published an electronic version of my first novel.

And here are all the books in my series featuring Casey Collins: 12 DRUMMERS DRUMMING and NIGHT ON FIRE.