THE AUTHOR

Elwood West

In 1994, someone lied to me. It cost me an opportunity I'll never get back. The day I figured out what actually happened, I came home and wrote a confession. Not to a priest, not to a therapist — to a blank page. That confession became a chapter. The chapter became a novel. The novel, because I apparently don't know when to stop talking, became a trilogy. In my defense, the lie was really, really good.

I'm Gen X. I grew up in Southeast Texas in the 1980s — where my father's Galician family and my mother's Scottish family had both been around since before Texas was Texas. Somewhere between the kilts and the sombreros they found each other, and here I am — genetically predisposed to both stubbornness and superstition, which turns out to be the exact DNA required to spend thirty years writing a supernatural thriller.

Since then I've lived in Hawaii, California, Arizona, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Texas again — because Texas always gets you back. I've circled the globe more than two dozen times, kept offices in São Paulo, New Delhi, London, Bangkok, Manila, Las Vegas, and enough other cities to qualify for an intervention from my frequent flyer program. Every city taught me something. New Orleans taught me that the dead don't leave just because you ask them to. Edinburgh taught me that a castle can hold a secret for eight hundred years without flinching. Las Vegas taught me that someone built a pyramid in the desert and nobody asked why.

All of them ended up in the books. Most of them were asking for it.

Native Texan · Displaced Floridian
Clan MacAlpin Scot · Galician Spaniard
Texican