I’m a crime writer, mother, wife, sister, grandmother, and coal miner’s daughter.

I was born in Drumheller Alberta but only because there was no hospital in the small coal mining town we lived in. My parents were newly arrived immigrants, originally from Poland, and we, like so many immigrant families then and now, lived a pretty basic life.

When the coal mining towns started to shut down, my father moved our family to Calgary, and it has been my home for most of my adult life.

When it came time to go to university, I chose to study science. After acquiring a Bachelor of Science in Geology I spent the next twenty or so years in the resource industry – first mining and later oil and gas. It was a big step off the traditional career path chosen by many women in the seventies.

I loved it. My work took me to the most northern reaches of Canada. I carried out exploration programs in the Northwest Territories, drilled wells in the Arctic, sat offshore drilling rigs in the Beaufort Sea. In addition to the challenging and fascinating work itself, I got to experience long warm days under the midnight sun, marvel at the vivid northern lights, watch herds of caribou migrate right past my tent. Experiencing the immense, desolate beauty of the vast Canadian north is something I’ll never forget.

But life usually doesn’t follow a straight path and the energy industry, like many others, is susceptible to global pressures and so after surviving thirteen rounds of layoffs at the company I’d been working for seventeen years I found myself, in 1999, a free agent – aka unemployed.

I found myself doing a lot of soul searching while taking stock of my skills and abilities in order to determine what it was that I really wanted to do next. The idea of becoming a writer had already been percolating in my brain for several years. Now the idea moved to the front of my thinking. It was no longer just an idea – but the growing realization that I really, wanted to write.

But my children were young, there were bills to pay, and it’s easy to find all sorts of reasons or excuses to not to do something. I set up my own consulting company and told myself I could write in my spare time.

But the urge to write grew stronger and stronger and over the following ten years or so I came close to packing in my consulting practice to write. Then finally at the end of 2013 the contact I had with an energy company came to a premature end. This time I took it for the gift it was.

I took a few months off to clear and cart off boxes of management books and shred tons of files from my home office and in March 2014 I sat down to write.

Knight Vision is the fourth book in my Jorja Knight mystery series, but it can be read as a standalone. My protagonist, Jorja Knight, is what I like to call, an everyday hero. She’s an ordinary woman trying to make her way in life. A former forensic analyst, her world is turned upside down when a brutal attack by a fellow employee on a killing spree leaves her re-evaluating what she really wants out of life. She decides to utilize her analytical skills in a different way and reinvents herself as a private investigator.

In Knight Vision, Jorja Knight has already been working as private investigator for a couple of years. Her last case thrust her into the limelight and brought out more than one would-be client seeking to share the spotlight. Yet when she’s approached by a psychic clairvoyant with a rising reputation, who claims she is seeing her own future murder, she’s sufficiently intrigued to take on the case.

Just as Jorja begins her hunt for her client’s predicted killer, a woman resembling her client is murdered. Jorja’s client starts to unravel, her premonitions amplify, she tells the media that the killer will strike again.

Jorja becomes suspicious of her intended role in the investigation when she discovers her client is keeping secrets from her. The psychic’s premonitions begin to manifest in her own world. As the physical threats escalate, Jorja fears the secrets her client harbors could cost both their lives.

When I was growing up it never even occurred to me that I could write for a living – people in my world, where I lived – didn’t grow up to be writers.

My parents like most other recently arrived immigrants, focused us on the practical aspects of life like going to school, getting an education, finding a good job. The idea that one could make a living as a writer was a foreign concept – and maybe still is (LOL).

Money was scarce, and like most kids who grew up in the era of no TV, no computers or video games I spent my childhood running around with the other neighborhood kids, playing make belief games, skipping rope, or racing leaves down the gutter after a big rain.

I developed a somewhat vivid imagination, and I became an avid reader.

My love of books continued into my adult years. Working in remote exploration camps, books were a primary form of entertainment as we had no access to TV, or other forms of entertainment.

My former career also required a lot of imaginative thinking. Scientific thinking requires curiosity, it requires asking ‘what if’ questions, postulating answers and then testing them through observation using senses of sight, touch, hearing and even taste and smell.

I was also that rare breed of geologists who actually enjoyed putting the final project reports together. I created manuals, and developed internal courses, gave talks.

But over time, my career moved away from exploration to other aspects of the energy business, some predicated by the company’s needs, and some by my own need to spend less time away from my young family. And over time and due to a myriad of reasons, I found myself working for a company that was struggling to stay afloat with little room or money for exploration, for creative endeavors, or imaginative solutions. At that point I knew the next phase of my life had to include the opportunity to create, to contribute something of meaning, to solve problems in unique and imaginative ways. I was also ready to take control of my own destiny. Sink or swim, I wanted to take back the reins of my own career.

Writing fiction incorporates so many of the elements I identified as needing in my next career. And although it took me another decade or so to make it happen, my writing life is more fulfilling than I ever imagined. I get to dream up problems for my protagonist to solve, help her figure out how to solve them while throwing her little annoying problems to deal with along the way – just to keep it real!

For starters, libraries were a godsend for me growing up. They offered me a window into a world that I could barely imagine. Although books were a luxury we couldn’t afford –thankfully library cards were free. I would take out the maximum number of books allowed at one time and return them well before their due date for another batch.

Over time, libraries became the place I took my children. They later became the place where I attended talks, readings, and book launches by other authors. They offered up the idea that this was possible for me too. And now that I’m writing full time, they occasionally provide a change of pace or scenery, a place to meet friends, or a comfy space in which to write.

All of my books have been published during the pandemic, starting with my first book in the fall of 2020. It entered the world in a cone of silence – no book signings, no live launch party. Around the same time, I had been hearing about the Indie Author Project – a collaborative endeavor by public libraries, authors, and readers to help make indie books known and available to library patrons. I was thrilled and grateful to submit my first eBook directly to the Calgary Public Library. This became a big part of my launch.

Last year, I received a phone call from a friend I met at a writing event. She was calling to tell me she had found my books in her local library. Although she knew I was writing and publishing books, finding my book in the library made it real – for her and for me. It finally felt like I had come full circle.