Iris Johansen left a job as an airline reservations agent in the early 1980s to begin writing romance novels.
[1] She changed direction slightly and began writing historical romantic suspense novels in 1991 with the publication of The Wind Dancer.
She settled in to suspense writing as her main genre with the crime fiction thriller Ugly Duckling, published in 1996[2] and soon after became a New York Times bestselling author.
In 2011, the second novel in Johansen's Eve Duncan series was made in to a Lifetime film adaptation, The Killing Game, starring Laura Prepon as forensic sculptor Eve Duncan.
Her son, Roy Johansen, is an Edgar Award-winning screenwriter and novelist.