I got my first typewriter at age 7. I’ve been writing ever since.

Between high school, college and full-time jobs, I spent 25 years as a newspaper editor and writer, covering everything from football games to Liberace. I was a senior financial editor at the Chicago Sun-Times when business news morphed from feel-good merchant profiles to swashbuckling tales of corporate raiders, bank collapses and Wall Street felonies, proving once again it’s better to be lucky than good. I cherished that noble profession, newspapering, but the turn of the millennium came and that seemed a natural time to scratch the other itch I’ve had since childhood: thriller novels. So I left a guaranteed weekly paycheck as an ink-stained wretch for the heady world of crime fiction.

Torn Apart is my newest thriller novel, the third in the Emily Thompson and Martin Benedetti cops-vs.-killers series I started in 2006. It will launch worldwide on July 6, 2010, from Pinnacle Fiction. It made my heart pound in my ears as I was writing it, a good sign that you might like it too. It joins Blown Away—which the prestigious RT Book Reviews named the nation’s best debut mystery—and Cut to the Bone in gathering accolades from such New York Times-bestselling authors as Jeffery Deaver, Lee Child, Tess Gerritsen, Douglas Preston, Erica Spindler, John J. Nance, Gayle Lynds, Alex Kava and John Lutz, with one critic enthusiastically reporting, “Cross James Patterson with Joseph Wambaugh, and you get Shane Gericke.” I don’t believe a word of this lavish praise, but my mom likes it, so there you go. My books have been translated into German, Chinese, Slovakian and Turkish. More coming soon.

I live in the Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois, where the series is set, with my wife of 31 years, Jerrle, who enthusiastically supports my madcap adventures in Thrillerland. When I’m not blowing up stuff in novels, I serve as chairman of the Thrillerfest literary conference in New York City. I’m a founding member of International Thriller Writers, and a member of Mystery Writers of America and The Society of Midland Authors.

Thanks for stopping by.