About Spring
A teacher who writes mysteries
I have taught for nearly three decades, at home and overseas, and I still teach today. I have visited more than eighty countries across all seven continents. I write clever, warm mysteries with smart, endearing women at the center, because I believe women belong at the center of the story, and the woman who notices everything makes the best detective.
Why mysteries
I have always read mysteries. The ones I love most have a smart woman at the center, places that come to life off the page, and an ending that makes me want to start the next book the same day. The Saudi Assignment grew out of my years teaching at American schools in the Middle East and out of a joke that followed me home every summer, when friend after friend asked whether I was secretly working for the CIA. I finally decided to write a woman who was. The Holly Flynn series is set in Pasadena, a charming city in the San Gabriel Valley suburbs of Los Angeles, because I wanted a sleuth who could walk out her front door and into a mystery I could picture.
How I got here
My first book was The PLAN to WIN, a simple system for reaching one goal at a time around a fulltime job. I had been accepted into a doctoral program and fully planned to go. But I had also just turned fifty and realized I wanted my legacy to be books people love, not a dissertation on a shelf. When my nephews heard their aunt was an author, they were thrilled, and then a little disappointed that it was not a book they could share with their friends. So I wrote them a mystery. The PLAN to WIN is still here for anyone with a goal she keeps putting off.
Where To BUY
FREE CHAPTERS
Read the introduction and first chapter of The PLAN to WIN free
One letter a week. Unsubscribe anytime.
My Favorite Reads Right Now
Mysteries I press into friends' hands, every one with a smart woman at the center who sees what the people around her miss.
1
The Thursday Murder Club
Richard Osman
Four retirees in an English village solve a real murder between tea and the crossword. The warmest smart mystery of the last decade, and the sleuths are all over seventy.
2
Killers of a Certain Age
Deanna Raybourn
Four women assassins, sent on a cruise to celebrate their retirement at sixty, discover their own organization wants them gone. Funny, sharp, and a love letter to women who are not finished yet.
3
Finlay Donovan Is Killing It
Elle Cosimano
A struggling novelist and single mother is mistaken for a hit woman at a Panera. Laugh-out-loud funny with a real mystery underneath.
4
The Expats
Chris Pavone
A former CIA officer follows her husband to Luxembourg and discovers that no one around her is who they claim to be. The spy novel I hand to anyone who liked The Saudi Assignment.
5
American Spy
Lauren Wilkinson
A young Black FBI agent in the 1980s is pulled into a Cold War operation that changes her life. Literary, tense, and told as a letter to her sons.
6
The Maid
Nita Prose
A hotel maid who sees the world differently finds a guest dead in his suite and becomes the prime suspect. Gentle, clever, and impossible to put down.
7
The Marlow Murder Club
Robert Thorogood
A seventy-seven-year-old crossword setter hears a gunshot during her evening swim in the Thames and recruits two new friends to solve the murder. The first in a series that became a television show.
8
How to Write a Murder
Jessica Brody
Seven mystery writers gather at a converted monastery for a conference, a landslide traps them, and someone starts turning plot into practice. A funny, clever locked-room puzzle from the author of Save the Cat! Writes a Novel.
And one of mine: The Saudi Assignment
A teacher who is secretly a CIA officer, a dead colleague, and a compound full of people who know everything about everyone.
Beyond the books
