Gerry Boyle began his writing career in newspapers—the best training ground ever. After Colby College, he worked many jobs, a roofer, a postman, and a manuscript reader at a big New York publisher. His first reporting job was with a weekly in the paper mill town of Rumford, Maine, where there was lots of small-town crime. He would later mine his Rumford time for his first novel, DEADLINE.

After a few months it was on to the daily Waterville, Maine Morning Sentinel, where he was a columnist and he wrote about stuff he saw in police stations, courtrooms, in the towns and cities of Maine. He enjoyed both hanging out with cops—and sitting with inmates in prison visiting rooms where he learned that the line between upstanding citizen and outlaw is a fine one.

DEADLINE came out in 1993. With an assist from Robert B. Parker, he landed a top-flight literary agent and other books came steadily after that, ONCE BURNED, LIFELINE, POTSHOT, BLOODLINE and BORDERLINE.

Gerry lives in a small village in central Maine, with his wife Mary, a school teacher, making regular trips for book research. He also writes for magazines, including Down East, and is the editor of the alumni magazine at Colby College. They have three children, who are scattered from Maine to Ireland.

Amy Calder, journalist for the Morning Sentinel, covers Waterville, including city government, and writes a column, “Reporting Aside,” which appears Mondays in both the Sentinel and Kennebec Journal.

Calder, who lives in Waterville, has worked at the newspaper 29 years, including a stint as bureau chief for the Somerset County Bureau in Skowhegan, and has covered a variety of beats.

A Skowhegan native (who is proud to say she was born in Waterville), she holds a bachelors in English from University of Hartford and completed post-graduate work in the School of Education at University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She holds more than a dozen awards from the Maine Press Association and New England Associated Press News Executives Association.

Calder lives in Waterville with her husband, Philip Norvish, a retired Sentinel reporter and editor.