Elaine Viets

She was a regular columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for twenty-five years,[1] her columns focusing mostly on local issues and human-interest fare.

By the time she had written the last of these, Viets had relocated to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1997, which became the locale for her next novels, the Dead-End Jobs series.

[1] Viets researches these books herself by taking the same sort of low-level dead-end jobs—telemarketer, shop clerk, and so forth—as the series' protagonist, Helen Hawthorne.

Viets, married for over thirty years to author and actor Don Crinklaw, is active in the trade organizations Mystery Writers of America and Sisters in Crime.

According to a subsequent update, Viets is recovering well and is again creating mysteries based on real life and the people who live it.