LS Hawker

LS Hawker is a USA Today bestselling author, an ITW Thriller Award finalist, and one of the most distinctive voices in American crime fiction. Her four novels THE DROWNING GAME, BODY AND BONE, END OF THE ROAD, and THE THROWAWAYS have been translated into eight languages and have earned praise from Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly, and Clarion Reviews.

Her fiction is about people who are not what they appear to be. People who have been underestimated, overlooked, or written off, and who turn out to be capable of far more than anyone expected. It is not a coincidence that she knows this territory well.

Before she wrote thrillers, Hawker lived like one of her characters: always moving, always reinventing, always finding herself in rooms where nobody expected to see her. She grew up in suburban Denver with a worrisome obsession with true crime and wrote her first novel at 14. She earned a B.S. in journalism from the University of Kansas, then spent the next two decades doing things that had no obvious connection to each other: hosting a radio show called People Are So Stupid, producing fitness videos where the babies were the weights, outfitting airports with computer equipment for a major airline, working as a traveling Kmart portrait photographer, serving as public affairs director at a Denver radio station, interning in television sports, and bearing witness to at least one basement exorcism.

What connected all of it was the fiction she wrote in between. And what the fiction kept returning to was the same question her life kept asking: what does a person do when the world has decided who they are, and they know the world is wrong?

THE DROWNING GAME introduced readers to Petty Moshen, raised in isolation, trained for survival, suddenly free, and completely unprepared for ordinary life. THE THROWAWAYS brought back two of those readers' favorite characters, Curt and George, twenty years younger and fighting for their lives in 1986 Kansas. Each novel stands alone. Together, they form the work of an author who has been asking the same questions from every possible angle.

Hawker lives in Colorado but considers Kansas her spiritual homeland. She has a hilarious, supportive husband, two brilliant daughters, and a music collection that has gotten completely out of hand. She co-hosts The Lively Grind Cafe podcast with her daughter Chloe.

Visit her website to read more, watch book trailers, and find out what she is working on next.