[8] Since childhood, she had a passion for exploring the great outdoors, including sailing with her father and wandering solo through the woods and fields during the family's long summers in rural Maine.

When kidded by coworkers about where her "fancy education" had gotten her, she happily taught them about the ancient seaway that had once existed in the area, sharing the fossils she had found up while digging for drain pipes that had been buried by the backhoe.

[1][2] In 2005, Andrews was awarded an Artists and Writers grant by the National Science Foundation and deployed through McMurdo Station, Antarctica to remote field camps to research an eleventh novel featuring fictional glaciologist Valena Walker.

[1][12] Other of her awards include:[13] Andrews, along with her husband and son, died in a private plane crash in Chadron, Nebraska, on July 24, 2019, on the way home from an air show in Wisconsin.

The more interesting crimes are the ones that involve all of the characters in the stories, including the protagonist—and where things fall through the cracks.In one of her jobs as a geologist, Andrews entertained herself during dull meetings by "picking someone across the table as a murder victim and then trying to figure out who killed him."

[19] Geologist Gene Shinn "worked for years on Andrews" to incorporate into one of her novels his theory of dust floating from somewhere in Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to the United States.

[19] Although no two observations are precisely identical, we find that we can nonetheless categorize them, over time and through the accumulation of experience, into themes and variations.Beyond her careers as a geologist and a novelist, Andrews has reflected on geology itself from a number of angles.