USA Today national bestseller Jan Burke has written eleven novels and a collection of short stories. In a starred review, Publisher's Weekly declared her most recent entry in the Irene Kelly series, Bloodlines, to be a "literary triumph."
Her series protagonist, newspaper reporter Irene Kelly, lives and works in fictional Las Piernas, a city that Long Beach, California area residents will find familiar. In addition to her series are Flight, featuring homicide detective Frank Harriman, and Nine, in which a group of vigilantes are killing off the FBI’s most wanted list and leaving the bodies in Los Angeles County. [See Publications List for a full list of her works.]
Burke is also the founder and director of the Crime Lab Project, an organization working to raise awareness of the problems facing crime labs and the need to obtain better funding for forensic science. (You can learn more about the CLP at www.crimelabproject.com .) She has been a speaker at meetings of the American Society of Crime Lab Directors, the California Association of Criminalists, the California Association of Crime Lab Directors, and other forensic science organizations. She is a member of the board of the California Forensic Science Institute.
Among other awards, Jan Burke won Mystery Writers of America's 2000 Edgar® Award for Best Novel, for Bones, and received an Edgar® nomination for Best Short Story for “The Abbey Ghosts.” Her short stories have won the Agatha, two Macavity awards, and the Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine Reader's Award. Her books and stories have been published internationally. Nine was recently optioned for film.
She was born in Houston, TX, but has spent most of her life in Southern California, often in coastal cities—several of which combine to make up the fictional Las Piernas, where her series character, newspaper reporter Irene Kelly works and lives.
She received a B.A. in history from California State University, Long Beach, where she worked as a researcher on an oral history project interviewing “Rosie the Riveters.” She later became the manager of a manufacturing plant for a large corporation.
From the age of seven, though, she wanted to write. She completed her first novel, Goodnight,Irene in the evenings after work. It was sold unagented and unsolicited to Simon & Schuster. She received a surprising boost from a new fan when, during his first White House interview after taking office, President Bill Clinton said he was reading Goodnight, Irene.
She soon left her day-job to write full-time. Since that time, Simon & Schuster has published eight Irene Kelly novels, Flight, a spin-off novel featuring homicide detective Frank Harriman, Nine, a standalone thriller, and 18, a collection of her first eighteen short stories.
The ninth Irene Kelly adventure was published in October, 2006.
She taught writing for the UCLA Extension Writers' Program and has been the keynote speaker at the Book Passage Mystery Writers Conference. She edited the first edition of Breaking and Entering, Sisters in Crime's guide to getting published, and served as an Associate Editor on Writing Mysteries: A Handbook by the Mystery Writers of America, edited by Sue Grafton. She is a longtime member of Sisters in Crime and has served on the national boards of Mystery Writers of America and the American Crime Writers League.
She has been the guest of honor at mystery conventions including Deadly Ink, Mayhem in the Midlands, and Murder in the Magic City, and was the Toastmaster for Malice Domestic in 2004.
You can learn more about Jan Burke and her work at her website http://www.janburke.com.
