About Author

Barbara Nickless was born in Guam and ended up in Colorado by way of multiple ports of call. Her mother, an English literature teacher, shared her love of books with her children. Barbara grew up reading H. Rider Haggard, E.E. “Doc” Smith, Leo Tolstoy, and Shakespeare with equal delight.

She knew early that she wanted to be a writer. Getting there, however, required a long apprenticeship in other lives. Over the years Barbara worked as a technical writer, instructional designer, raptor rehabilitator, piano teacher and performer, sword fighter, and Director of Education for the nation’s largest public astronomical observatory. Then a wildfire destroyed her family’s home, and with it went any reason to postpone the work she most wanted to do.

Barbara is now a novelist, teacher, and speaker. She is the author of the multi-award-winning Sydney Parnell novels (optioned for television), beginning with Blood on the Tracks; the award-winning Evan Wilding series; the standalone spy thriller The Drowning Game; and a new series that begins with A Voice in the Dark (optioned for film).

In addition to her fiction, Barbara teaches creative writing at the Lyda Hill Institute for Human Resilience, where she works with veterans and others affected by trauma. She has also taught in Ukraine, helping civilians and combat veterans use writing to process loss and moral injury. Across her teaching and speaking, she is interested in the ways story can help us make meaning from suffering. She also writes An Unquiet American, a Substack exploring literature, espionage, crime, and history as ways of thinking more deeply about power and violence. Her writing draws on continuing study in intelligence, espionage, war, security, open-source investigation, and the psychological aftermath of trauma.

She continues to travel widely, drawing inspiration from journeys to Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, South Africa, Egypt, Israel, the West Bank, and Turkey, as well as from the miles she has logged in the Colorado Rockies. Whether on the page, in the classroom, or on the road, she remains guided by the belief that stories are among our best ways of exploring the world.