Official Web Site of Author Stan Jones: Biography

I was born in Anchorage, Alaska. But my parents were from Tennessee and moved back there when I was about two.

So I spent my boyhood through age twelve on a farm near the Tennessee-Mississippi border. I actually shot squirrels with a .22 rifle, picked cotton, rode bareback on a giant plowhorse named Bob, and raised a heifer that I entered in the county fair! The county in question, by the way, was McNairy County, notable chiefly for moonshiners and a sheriff named Buford Pusser, who busted the moonshiners and became famous in a corny movie called “Walking Tall.”

My parents, it turned out, had caught the Alaska bug, so we moved back to Anchorage when I was twelve and I’ve lived in Alaska ever since, except for a couple of relatively brief college-related absences spent “Outside,” as Alaskans call the rest of the United States.

In my late twenties, I moved with my wife, Susan, to the Inupiat Eskimo village of Kotzebue. I found the lovely, barren Arctic landscape absolutely mesmerizing, the extreme climate a joy, and the Native culture fascinating. I landed Bush planes on the sea ice, drove snowmachines--or 'snowgos," as they're called in Kotzebue--over the tundra, hunted moose and caribou, and once helped paddle a sealskin umiaq in pursuit of a bowhead whale on the Chukchi Sea off Point Hope.

After Kotzebue, I lived in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and then Anchorage again, working as a newspaper journalist. I won several major national awards for investigative stories that led to impeachment proceedings against one of Alaska’s governors, and for coverage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill.

Later, I worked for the Prince William Sound Regional Citizens' Advisory Council, set up after the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989 to prevent a recurrence. While there, I co-authored with oral historian Sharon Bushell The Spill: Personal Stories from the Exxon Valdez Disaster.

After I left Kotzebue, I found the country, weather and people of Northwest Alaska more interesting than ever, so I started the Nathan Active series. The fictional village of Chukchi is modeled on Kotzebue in many respects, and some of the characters in the series are loosely crafted around real people I knew.

I live in Anchorage. My wife is an epidemiologist and karate master. We have two children, both adults.

I'm a wildly eclectic reader, but of course I have a special interest in the literature of the north. Some of my favorite authors in that genre are Charlie Brower, Hudson Stuck, Edgar Keithahn, Paul Green, Chester Seveck, Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Edwin Hall, Ernest Burch, and Claire Fejes (who was also a wonderful painter of Eskimo life in Northwest Alaska).

Patricia Watts

Patricia is my co-writer on The Big Empty and Ghost Light. Here's her bio:

I was a “military brat” born at Ladd Field (now Fort Wainwright) near Fairbanks, Alaska. I shared my first home, an eight-by-twelve-foot trailer on the edge of the woods at Eielson Air Force Base, with my parents and older brother.

Three decades later, I returned to Alaska to continue a twenty-year journalism career with ten years as arts and features editor at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, followed by nine years as a human rights investigator in Anchorage.

In between, my life took me around the world: military housing in Kansas, the piney woods of Georgia, an apartment next to a pig farm in Japan, a motorcycle trek through Central America, college among the California redwoods, a newspaper job in downtown Honolulu.

Writing was always something that belonged to me when other parts of my life were lost or broken. My first “book” was hand-written on notebook paper when I was thirteen. I kept it stashed in the back of my bedroom closet. It was about a girl who meets and marries and lives happily ever after with her favorite Beatle—Paul, of course. My favorite author at the time was Thomas Hardy.

Looking back, I feel privileged to have been a teen-ager during the ‘60s, the era with the most important causes and the best music. I still would rather listen to Marvin Gaye than Kendrick Lamar.

After raising two children, becoming a grandma, and finding my inner redhead, I published my first novel, Watchdogs (SheWrites Press, 2013), a steamy noir mystery set in Fairbanks followed by an urban Alaska suspense novel The Frayer (Golden Antelope Press, 2017). It features a living Fairbanksapartment building as hero/antihero locked in a duel with a sinister new resident. Paper Targets, a novel released in May 2022, is the story of two nice suburban ladies with a lifetime of little rages simmering just below the surface.

Collaborating with Stan Jones on the Nathan Active Alaska crime series was a risky choice for me as a writer and personally. Thankfully, we successfully produced two books, The Big Empty and Ghost Light. I now live in San Diego.

I create imperfect characters and plots with jagged edges that don’t all smooth out in the end. I read Walter Mosley, Margaret Atwood, Gillian Flynn, Christopher Bohjalian, Shakespeare, and Tana French.

I believe reading, like writing, should be agitating and satisfying, not necessarily in that order.

Mary Wasche

Mary is my co-writer on SHERLOCK.

Here's her bio:

She was first published at age seventeen after winning a state writing contest. During the ensuing decades, she has had hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and photos published. She presently works from lake country Minnesota, and also spent decades living on an Alaskan mountainside. Since graduating from the University of Minnesota, Mary has worked as a dental hygienist, teacher, small business owner, and bank executive, while continuing to be a contributing writer to national and regional publications and writing novels and screenplays.

She does book signings and speaks to groups throughout the Minnesota on “How to get a Book From Your Head Into Your Hand” – a popular subject!

She is the author of Escape to Alaska, Murder in Wasilla, and Resolute Heart.