She worked in television news as an assistant film editor for NBC in New York City, then relocated to D.C. where she joined National Public Affairs Center for Television, the public affairs unit that first paired Robert MacNeil with Jim Lehrer.

Hellmann also spent time at TVN, the news syndication service underwritten by Joseph Coors, and NBC in Washington, DC.

She founded Fischer Hellmann Communications in 1985, which specializes in video production, speech writing, and spokesperson training.

Her second crime fiction series, featuring Private Investigator Georgia Davis, debuted in 2008 with Easy Innocence.

In 2010 she released Set the Night on Fire, published by Allium Press, a stand-alone thriller that goes back, in part, to the late 1960s in Chicago.

In 2006 Hellmann founded The Outfit Collective, a blog that was shared by eleven Chicago crime fiction authors.