Cécile Chabot was born in Liège, Belgium in 1969 and attended the Lycée Léonie de Waha, a girls-only (at that time) school founded in the 19th century to prepare girls for university. There, she received a solid grounding in the sciences and modern languages.Afterwards, she graduated from the University of Liège with a Masters degree in Law and another degree in European Law. Whenever she could, she chose courses that satiated her hunger for history (Medieval history, History of Islam, among others) and was most fascinated by those courses on the curriculum that dealt with the origins of law and institutions (Roman law, History of Natural Law, Philosophy of Law). At university, she began spelunking (caving) on a regular basis.Over the years, she has wandered from Mexico to Colombia, where she landed by boat in Cartagena de Indias via the San Blas islands. Along the way, she visited all of Central America. Head to http://www.cecilechabot.com for an account of how it all started―with a spelunking expedition in Guatemala... and the discovery of a cave.The Cycle of Xhól is her most ambitious writing project so far. This 16-book series of historical mysteries is set in Dos Pilas, a Mayan city located in what is today the northern part of Guatemala. The cycle starts in 679 A.D. with book 1, The Merchant of Death, and will end one century later with book 16. Before committing to paper the first line of The Merchant of Death, Cécile already knew that the full story would take sixteen books to complete, why it would be so, and, more importantly, how it would all end. Be warned, she stubbornly refuses to reveal that conclusion before book 16 hits the shelves. She delights in locating her mysteries in a painstakingly reconstructed universe.She is also the author of Nouvelles d'Amérique Centrale, a collection of short stories based on her travels where she shares the deep impressions the continent left on her soul (to be published in English in 2015 under the title Nueva Jerusalem and Other Short Stories from Central America).She speaks five languages with various degrees of fluency, lives in Brussels, and will bore you to death at social events when she gets started on her pet subject (the difficulty of mastering the declination of hard and soft vowel-ending adjectives in Czech). She has no cat because languages are enough. She is deadly afraid that some day an archaeologist might read her books and write to her to point out what she got wrong.Cécile publishes a not-so weekly newsletter in which she hops from her explorations of the Mayan jungles to her ventures in the publishing world. Sign up at http://www.cecilechabot.com/newsletter, and she'll send you a copy of her Diary of a Spelunking Expedition in Guatemala as a token of her appreciation.She is quite active on Twitter (@CecileChabot) and tweets in French, English and Spanish about literature, the Mayans, Central America, her favourite reads, what delights and amuses her―and the enchanting beauty of words.