A one-time innkeeper with a taste for adventure, Elizabeth has been a private pilot, sky diver, SCUBA diver, and liveaboard sailor.  Extensive travel in the US, Canada, Mexico and Europe led to a second career as a free-lance travel writer, during which she began writing a series of police procedural mysteries set in southeast Minnesota, where she grew up.  Her books contrast the sometimes gritty routine of police work with the idyllic rural scenes around a mid-size city in the upper midwest.  Featured characters are a hard-working police detective named Jake Hines and his girlfriend, Trudy Hanson, a forensic scientist at the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension in St. Paul.

In her new southwest series, Elizabeth follows Sarah Burke, a big-city homicide detective dealing with cutting-edge problems in an ancient setting. The valley that holds Tucson , Arizona , had been occupied by native Americans for thousands of years by the time the Spanish came questing for glory and gold. Folded into the U.S, by the Gadsden Purchase in 1852, it has always reflected its border heritage, with a polyglot population constantly growing more diverse. Sarah must deal with a colorful mix of twenty-first century adventurers: big-time builders and small-time gamblers, cotton growers and cattle herders, drug-runners and people smugglers, copper miners looking for old wealth and bioscientists chasing a new bonanza, hard-pressed undocumented immigrants scrambling up from the south and retiring boomers bringing wealth and optimism down from the north. Naturally, these people don’t all mingle peacefully. Wherever their interests collide, that’s a wonderful place for a crime novelist. And there’s good hiking in the mountains all around.

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