Cesar Fernandez writes the kind of novels he grew up reading. Elmore Leonard showed him that the dialogue does the work and the writer stays out of the way. Carl Hiaasen showed him that the people around a crime are usually stranger and funnier than the crime itself. His writing owes a debt to both of them.

He is a native New Yorker who traded the city for the North Georgia mountains, where he lives with his wife, Nancy, and a full house of four children, two dogs, two cats, and a lizard. When he is not busy taking care of this lively household, he enjoys time outdoors, family vacations, and experimenting with new recipes in the kitchen.

For most of his working life he wrote nonfiction—IT and business journal articles, and plenty of code, which he still writes. Useful work, all of it, but not the kind of writing he wanted. He wanted to write crime. A true-crime junkie, he watches the shows in bed late at night, after his wife is asleep. Some nights a scream or a gunshot startles her awake. He tells her it’s research.

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