Born in France to American parents, I was brought back to the United States as a baby. My older sister, younger brother and I grew up mostly in Massachusetts and New York. As a child, the one thing I vowed I would never be was a writer -- mostly because my parents said I could be one and refusing seemed like a good way to rebel. Yet it was the one thing I loved most to do.

By the age of nineteen, I knew there was no resisting it and I wrote a trio of (unpublished) novellas. Through college and graduate school, the novels flowed. Two were published by a small press (though under a different name). Meanwhile, like most struggling artists and writers, there was the endless stream of day-jobs in Manhattan: waitress, secretary at a publishing house and then for a Broadway producer, fundraising assistant for a circus, IT writer at a bank, executive assistant for a nonprofit arts group. And the zillions of freelance writing and temp office jobs. It was when I started teaching fiction writing that I knew I had found the other work, along with writing novels, that I truly loved.

Through a decade, I wrote, worked, and travelled. The frenetic single days changed, of course, when I fell in love with my wonderful husband Oliver, an Emmy Award winning film editor. Thirteen years later, we have two beautiful children -- a twelve-year-old son whose devotion to playing baseball and guitar doesn't get in the way of topping the honor roll at school, and a nine-year-old daughter who writes great mystery stories in her spare time and has a voice big enough to fill the Metropolitan Opera -- a house in New York City and two demanding careers.

You might say that the challenge of being a modern-day mother led to me write suspense. It seems to me that the more love you let into your life, the more fragile and risky it becomes, because you have so much to lose. One day, standing on a beach, looking out at the water, I wondered what would be worse for me as a mother: to have my children taken from me, or to be taken myself so that I could no longer protect them. What, I asked myself, would

happen to a family if a mother went on a common errand and... disappeared? Thus Five Days in Summer (2004) was born, and with it a career as a suspense novelist. With Seven Minutes to Noon (2005), my work comes closer to home, literally, as it takes place in Brooklyn, New York where I live. In One Cold Night (2006)I trace the inner lives of a family in crisis over one night and the next day. Here She Lies, coming in May 2007, explores identity theft in the context of a woman who betrays her identical twin.

I spend my time writing until my kids get home from school. Then I'm a mom, serving snacks, overseeing homework, cooking dinner and racing the clock through baths and bedtime. I also teach a college fiction writing class. My weeks are exhausting, but they're also full and satisfying. As a young woman, I developed an idea of what I wanted out of life: to be a writer and a mother. As they say, beware of what you ask for, you just may get it!