About Author Renée Gardner I was born in Philadelphia and had a fairly normal childhood except: I came close to being lynched by a hoard of disgruntled mothers after I ruined a tap dancing recital; I had diphtheria at the age of six so I missed learning the basics of reading and my older sister left me as security at a local ice cream parlor after she discovered that she didn't have enough money to pay for our ice cream sodas. I majored in retailing at Temple University, but it took me just six months as a buyer-in-training at a local department store to realize that I'd rather shop than sell -- so there went that career. Over the years I tried careers in public relations, finance, travel, cosmetics, executive search and electronic ticketing as I moved from Philadelphia to Boston and finally to Manhattan, where I lived for thirty wonderful years. Unlike diphtheria, the writing bug didn't bite me until I was an adult living in Manhattan. As I looked back over my working life, I realized that two I jobs shoved onto the path to becoming a writer. The first job was at a Madison Avenue public relations agency. My rapid advance from secretary to assistant to the Fashion Director and finally the big leap being the Director of the Television/Radio Department became the basis for my first book From: Secretary To: Executive, a humorous how-to book for secretaries who aspire to climb the corporate ladder. But the book never hit the bookstores because by the time I finished writing it, young women with college degrees had instant access to the executive suite. This was an exciting time in my life. I traveled to fashion "shoots" in the Caribbean, Ireland and other exotic places. I dressed models at fashion shows. I attended cocktails parties. I accompanied spokespersons and celebrities when they made media appearances around the country. Some days I pranced around New York as glamorous as Sarah Jessica Parker in "Sex and the City." Other days I was as overworked as Anne Hathaway in "The Devil Wears Prada." When my Prada days began to outnumber my Sex days, I decided that I was overdue for a career change. The final job that helped me hone my writing skills was at a startup electronic ticketing company. I was happy there for about a year until the president of the company announced that he was moving the business to Los Angeles. "Will you come with me?" he asked. "How much more will you pay me to leave my beloved Manhattan?" I asked. "Nothing," he said. So I said, "Tah, tah." During the next six months, he spent one week a month in New York and the rest of the time in Los Angeles, while every day I went to an empty office to open the mail and answer the telephone that rarely rang. With so much downtime, I decided to write another book -- only this time it would be fiction -- and was it ever. The Legacy was a sweeping novel that traced the lives of four beautiful Caucasian women who were raised in a high class brothel in Hong Kong prior to the Crown Colony's return to control by the Chinese government. (Don't ask.) It sounded like a bestseller to me. The only problem was that two weeks spent in "The Pearl of the Orient" did not make me an authority on Hong Kong prostitutes, brothels or the exotic delights offered by them and ultimately the book collapsed like a punctured balloon. By the time I discovered that I was incapable of writing a far-reaching saga peppered with heavy doses of sex and intrigue, I was out of a job, but -- to quote a character in my first mystery novel, "...when one door closes, another one opens." And so it was for me. My husband Frank retired from one job and immediately began a new career that allowed me to stay at home and write full time. Since I loved to read mystery novels, I thought it would be great fun to kill people. The books in my Sutton Place Mystery series, The Tap Dancing Gorilla and And the Dog Took the Cat, are set on Manhattan's Upper East Side where Frank and I lived until 2005 when he retired from his second career and he called in a promise that I made to him in a moment of weakness (it was our wedding day) -- we would trade the canyons of Manhattan for the swaying palm trees of Southwest Florida on the Gulf of Mexico. I still dreadfully miss the Big Apple, but I have adjusted to my new life. I accept the fact that it will rain at least once a day from mid-May through mid-October; I don't get upset when a golf ball slams into the side of our house or when a family of lizards strays into our screened lanai. (They do look exactly like the little guy in the GEICO commercials.) BUT I will forever be awestruck by the breathtaking sunsets that I have the good fortune to witness every evening. I am a member of Mystery Writers of American and Sisters-in-Crime. I served on the national board of MWA, as well as on the board of its New York Chapter and on the board of the New York Chapter of SinC. In addition to my novels, I've also published several articles as well as short stories, which are nasty as my mystery novels are funny. My first short story appeared in Woman's World magazine which is read by more than one million women every month. I am currently working on my third mystery novel.