She is a New York Times bestselling author of twenty crime novels, including The Ex, The Wife, and The Better Sister, and two series—one featuring NYPD Detective Ellie Hatcher, and the other, Portland, Oregon, prosecutor Samantha Kincaid.

[4] Burke received her Bachelor of Arts in psychology from Reed College, in Portland, Oregon, completing the senior thesis "Emotion's effects on memory: spatial narrowing of attention."

After law school, she served as a judicial clerk to Betty Binns Fletcher of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, and then as a Multnomah County Deputy District Attorney in Portland, where she prosecuted domestic violence offenses and served as an in-precinct advisor to the police department.

In 2014, publisher Simon & Schuster announced that Mary Higgins Clark and Burke were collaborating on the Under Suspicion series, featuring an intrepid television journalist who reinvestigates cold cases.

[7] In Dead Connection, Ellie Hatcher tracks a serial killer who uses an online dating service to locate his victims.