Laurie O'Connor Stephans, Neighbor

By day, Laurie works at a law firm. By night (when not fighting crime), she exercises her writing muscles in favor of the real ones. Most of her fiction features humor and twist endings, while she observes real life on the pages of her website blog, We B Late.

She and her husband, Mike, share their empty nest with two ridiculously entitled dogs that (most days) they wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. She credits their harmonious forty-plus years of marriage to the shared joy of grandparenthood, and not the catharsis that comes from killing off characters whose resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Laurie loves theater (especially musicals), the Chicago Blackhawks (and hockey in general), reading (of course), puzzles (crossword and jigsaw), games (especially trivia), and watching Jeopardy (“I’ll take overuse of parentheses for $1,000, Alex”).