AUTHOR BIO

Born in Chicago, the summer of '68. My dad owned a drug store. My mom was my full-time mom. I had a little sister to torment. I attended Catholic schools, including an all-male high school. An altar boy who volunteered to serve at funerals, I contemplated becoming a priest. Left home for Grinnell College in Iowa. Everything changed.

I started to write.

Working as a cook's assistant, I learned to clean a tip-skillet and make moussaka for five hundred friends. I sold trees in the summer. I loaded trucks on a warehouse dock. I bused tables at a jazz club. The opportunity arose to study abroad, but I did it back in Chicago, as a fellow at the Newberry Library, living on Rush and Division. I won a story-writing contest. One day at the library, I touched an F. Scott Fitzgerald manuscript.

I knew I had to be a writer.

I tackled grad school in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Academia was not for me. I wanted to write fiction. Then the best thing happened to me – this woman I met in Intro to Old English. My wife, Lisa – she didn't know what she was getting into, really. Degreed and in love, we moved back to Chicago.

I got a job in social services. Wrote my stories at night.

Case management by daylight: helping people with mental illness and developmental disabilities find housing, jobs, services.

I had one client who thought the Devil was stabbing him with pitchforks. West Side home visit: a pack of pit bulls menaced me. Gang bangers refused to let me park on their street.

Cops mistook me for a knife-wielding schizophrenic (who just happened to be another client of mine). I was nearly shot. Perspectives adjusted. I began a novel. Called it SKIN RIVER.

Two books later, I've got a pair of full-time jobs: writing and being a dad to my two kids. I like to lift weights and go fishing (not simultaneously). I read a lot about conspiracies. I've always been afraid of needles. I can't drink beer. It's God's way of telling me to buy the hard stuff. Go White Sox.

My latest effort is THE MIRROR'S EDGE. Set in Chicago, it's about a double kidnapping and the occult. Available April 2008 from St. Martin's Press.