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Hello and thanks for the visit. We often define ourselves by the work we do, and I’ve worked in many jobs: English teacher abroad, tax officer, business analyst, bartender. I liked teaching and bartending best. Writing came to me later in life, when I wrote stories for a friend about a romance I was having.

I started my first novel in 2002. I set out to depict a woman who, looking for meaning in her life, enters a world of obsessive sex and to interweave her erotic entanglement with another form of ensnarement: a capital murder investigation in which the full weight of police power bears down on a person who may be innocent. I wanted so much to write something deep, meaningful, exciting, important. These inflated expectations paralyzed me, and the project bogged down.

After some intervening years, some writing about not being able to write, some living, some tending to relationships and jobs, some pain, disappointment, and yearning for a better way, I said to myself, “I will just open the world of my mind, my thoughts, and my perversions for those who want to read about them.” As I let the story flow and stopped struggling to make it anything special, it finally emerged, page by page, chapter by chapter.

I now sit in my writing room, overlooking the village of Hirschhorn, Germany, where I live with my husband. The ducks are playing, riding the current in the stream as they always do when the water is high. I look beyond the Neckar River into the forest, with its rich green hues, and at the medieval castle nestled high on the hill, as I write the lines of my next story…

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Mark has traipsed around Asia for years, teaching English and pursuing one doomed get-rich-quick scheme after another. When his latest idea, a sex manual preeningly titled “Give the People What They Want,” is rejected by publishers and his local girlfriend gets pregnant, he turns to a new gambit: drug smuggling.