Stalemate (Pocketbook)

Known particularly for her novels of suspense, Iris Johansen has seen dozens of her books appear on the bestseller lists. Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Johansen was a voracious reader from an early age. Later, raising two children as a single mother, she worked as an airline reservations clerk and wrote in whatever free time she could eke out of her busy schedule. She sometimes arrived at the airport at five in the morning, so that she could have a quiet hour to herself, and she often wrote in the car while waiting for her son and daughter to finish their afterschool activities. (Her son, Roy, is now a screenwriter and has also collaborated with his mother on several novels.) After both had left for college, Johansen quit her job to try her hand at writing full-time. "I was just as voracious a writer as I was a reader," she recalled to one journalist. She began her career by penning romances--many of them for Bantam's "Loveswept" line--and soon became a familiar name to fans of the genre. In 1996, she branched out into crime fiction, publishing THE UGLY DUCKLING, about the victim of a brutal assault who is determined to get revenge on her attacker. Johansen has since become known for her recurring characters, and among the most popular of these is Eve Duncan, a forensic sculptor who creates likenesses based on remains too decomposed to be recognizable. Eve, who is haunted by the murder of her own young daughter, made her first appearance in FACE OF DECEPTION (1998). "[The idea] came from seeing a documentary on the Discovery Channel," Johansen has explained. "I had never heard of a forensic sculptor before. I thought ?What if?' A lot of great stories have come from ?What if?'" IRIS JOHANSEN'S THE KILLING GAME, a film based on one of the Eve Duncan books, aired on Lifetime television in 2011.