Meg Gardiner

Meg Gardiner was born in Oklahoma and raised in Santa Barbara, California. She graduated from Stanford University and Stanford law school. She practiced law in Los Angeles and taught writing at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Gardiner now lives with her family near London.

China Lake, one of her Evan Delaney novels, won the 2009 Edgar award from the Mystery Writers of America for Best Paperback Original.

The Dirty Secrets Club, featuring Jo Beckett, won the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Procedural Novel of 2008.

Gardiner's latest novel, The Nightmare Thief, is now available.

Her reply to my recent query about what she was reading:

At the moment I'm reading two vastly different books about music. The big, bad, serious nonfiction book is The Rest is Noise, Alex Ross's majestic and incisive history of music in the Twentieth Century. How Ross manages to bring music to life through words amazes me. His research is both encyclopedic and fascinating. Colorful stories -- of affairs, riots, suicides, passion, supermarket rage -- add richness to the narrative. I come from a family of musicians (classical and rock 'n' roll). They've all either read and loved this book, or are lurking, waiting to grab it from my hands.

I'm also reading Carl Hiaasen's Star Island. It's about a pop starlet whose antics put Britney and Lindsay in the shade. Music -- actual music -- is of course almost immaterial to the pop tart's success. The novel's about the excesses of celebrity culture, and nobody satirizes American excess like Hiaasen. Last week I was reading this book on a flight, and laughed so hard that I thought the flight attendant was going to taser me.

Visit Meg Gardiner's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Nightmare Thief.

--Marshal Zeringue