Laurel Collins is the author of a dozen traditionally-published historical romance titles, including three under her “Catherine Wyatt” pen name, and a total of over a quarter of a million copies sold. She spent the last twenty years working in local government, where she recently retired from a position as a database developer, specializing in data collection, analysis, and reporting. Although working in IT may seem a far cry from writing fiction, she assures us that there is more creativity that you’d think in designing a good user interface. But she is grateful to finally have the time to focus on her writing again.
As with so many other women before her, age and experience have led her from romance to murder (fictional, of course). Her first book, DARK SURRENDER was a historical romantic suspense, and she flirted with the mystery genre when, under her “Catherine Wyatt” pen name, she created fictional heroines whose exploits were based on the achievements of authentic women in nineteenth-century history. ROSE IN THE SHADOWS is based on the true story of Kate Warne, Pinkerton agent and the first professional woman detective; and WHISPERED WORDS is a fictionalized story of Nellie Bly, the pioneering female journalist and investigative reporter.
Laurel is a member of Sisters in Crime and recently completed her first historical mystery, set in Gilded Age Chicago and featuring a budding suffragist and a police detective, working together to catch the fiend preying on the city’s factory girls. She is currently at work on a dual-timeline novel that tells the story of a modern-day young woman who sets out to piece together her family’s history, with help from an aunt with advancing dementia, and winds up uncovering a host of family secrets, including her mother’s abandonment of the family when she was a child. The historical portion of the story is based on the unbelievable true life story of a 19th century Chicago businesswoman and journalist.
A native Chicagoan, Laurel lives with her husband in one of the city’s western suburbs. Over the past twenty years, they’ve vacationed through Europe together, enjoying the history, culture, and the food, while she collected ideas for future books. When not writing, you’ll find her haunting genealogy websites to fill in the missing branches on her family tree, researching obscure historical facts for her next book, or visiting with her children and grandchildren.
Laurel Collins 