Los Angeles Times bestselling author Dianne Emley is a Los Angeles native, growing up far from the city's glitz and glamour in a hardscrabble neighborhood in the multicultural Northeast side, where she attended public schools. She earned a B.A. in Philosophy and an MBA, both from UCLA, and has held a variety of day jobs, mostly in business middle management. For years during the early morning before she headed to the office, she wrote fiction. Her first book, Cold Call, a mystery about Iris Thorne--a sexy, single L.A. investment counselor in the "greed is good" late 1980s--was sold at auction to Pocket Books/Simon and Schuster and published in 1993. It was followed by four more books in that series. After Dianne moved to Pasadena, a historic city neighboring L.A., and began volunteering for the Pasadena Police Department, she was inspired to take her writing in a new direction and began writing about Nan Vining--a haunted and driven homicide detective and single mom. The first in the series, The First Cut (2006), was a Los Angeles Times bestseller and reached #1 on Amazon. The series fifth, Killing Secrets, will be out in July 2015.The Night Visitor, a standalone paranormal mystery, was published in 2014.Critics around the world have praised Dianne's books, which have been published in 20 countries and translated into six languages: "A gripping page-turner..." (Library Journal); "Expertly plotted... redolent with suspense and action..." (Florida Sun-Sentinel); "A superior piece of storytelling..." (Los Angeles Times); "Relentless suspense..." (Booklist). Dianne lives in the Central California wine country with her husband where she writes full time and is a pretty good cook, an amateur oenophile, and a terrible golfer.