Vicki Pettersson

I am a Las Vegas native who has always loved to read and write, yet a brief post-college stint in public relations convinced me that "working on assignment" was not the career for me. So I did what any self-respecting Vegas girl would do: I became a showgirl by night... and a closet novelist by day. A decade later I became an "instant bestseller" with my Signs of the Zodiac fantasy series featuring reluctant superhero, Joanna Archer. The Celestial Blues para-noir trilogy - about a 1950's PI-turned-angel unwillingly dumped into the 21st century - quickly followed, and I recently finished work on a stand-alone psychological thriller. Though I write both paranormal and straight thrillers, the tie that binds my work together is my insistence and love for strong female characters, and with ten novels behind me I can now look back and clearly see that my passion - no, my obsession - is writing about what it means to be a woman in this man's world. How we choose to move through it. How we define and present ourselves in it. How we prepare our daughters to do the same. Of course, there are countless ways to answer this question, and my protagonists in my first two series - Joanna Archer and Kit Craig - do so in very different ways. Yet whether their strength is primarily physical or mental, the one thing all my female protagonists share is a willingness to face their respectively dark and dangerous worlds head-on. I love that, and so I continue to write about women who defy the odds, women who refuse to be silenced or stopped. I write the women who simply won't be written off.