Colleen Tully Steel was born in California’s Steinbeck country where she spent sun blasted summers cowboying on an old-fashioned working ranch. No murders occurred there, except in her imagination. She went on to become a bookstore manager, front list buyer, and short story writer. Several of her stories appeared in small magazines before she took up novel writing. Still too polite to commit real murders, she expresses that temptation through crime fiction.

Married to a Professor of Mathematics, she now lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.