Keith Murphy was born in a small town near Houston, Texas and attended Texas A&M University. He found the countless hours of study required to achieve an engineering degree tedious, and so read most of the who-done-It mysteries in the library as a diversion. In particular he enjoyed the style presented by Sir Conan Doyle for Sherlock Holmes novels. In those mysteries, the information was always provided in the story for the reader to be able to solve the crimes for themselves-if they were smart enough to figure it out. The murder mysteries presented in this book were modeled after that style.