Carl & Jane Bock
For more than thirty-five years we worked as Professors of Biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder. For the most part it was a good time. The students and the science kept us young. We counted many colleagues among our best friends, and we did our best to avoid or at least ignore the sorts of petty squabbling that otherwise can pollute an academic life.
Jane is a botanist and a forensic plant scientist, who uses her botanical knowledge in criminal investigations. Carl is a zoologist with a particular interest in birds. We share a passion for the ecology and conservation of grasslands in the American West. Our field studies have taken us from the prairies of eastern Montana to the high plains of southeastern Arizona, and lots of place in between.
We have been enthusiastic readers of mystery novels all our lives. The stories we have enjoyed the most are ones that have taken us deep into landscapes the author knows better than we do. Following retirement, we turned from writing nonfiction books and scientific papers to the creation of our own series, the Arizona Borderlands Mysteries. The novels are set in a particular southwestern desert grassland, where our protagonist is a deputy sheriff stationed in a remote corner of Arizona’s smallest county, just a few miles from Mexico. We have worked and lived in this place since the mid-1970s. While our stories are entirely fictional, our goal has been to convey in them our understanding and love for this unique land and its people.
Today we divide our time between Colorado, Arizona, and Florida, fighting crime (Jane), fly-fishing (Carl), reading, and writing mysteries. Following the seasoned advice that we should be writing what we know, we have a second mystery series under construction that is set in the Florida Keys and the Everglades. Our protagonist is a guide who takes people into the backcountry, usually to fish and sometimes to watch birds, but who finds himself periodically entangled in other people’s mischief.
Please join us.