About

California-based Fiona Manning was born in Australia, “the land of football, meat pies, kangaroos, and Holden cars.” Influenced from an early age by the writings of explorer Louis Becke, she idolized his spare prose and the fact that he wrote right up until the minute he died. With his boots on.

Though writing runs in her family, she wishes she could also sing, but she can’t. She also wishes she’d inherited her grandfather’s ability to play the clarinet. But she didn’t. She still envies her late grandmother’s ability to crochet because she can’t do that either.

From the time she was ten, writing has been her passion. She wrote long, tortured love letters to her favorite singer (John Farnham) and favorite movie star (Richard Chamberlain). These were never answered and prepared her well for future romantic and literary disappointment.

She’s been a journalist for four decades and has juggled part-time jobs that have fueled her novels, though, not made her wealthy. Dark Dawn was her first mystery novel and she’s now working on a series of books featuring Eleni Nina Santor, a Greek-American female U.S. Marshal.