Laurell K. Hamilton is the author of the popular "Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter" series featuring a hunter of vampires whose adventures contain, according to Patricia Altner in Library Journal, "an abundance of thrills, chills, violence, and sexual innuendo." Since the early 1990s, Hamilton has enjoyed success with these books as well as with novels in the "Meredith Gentry" series, in which members of the various faerie races live side by side with human beings. Hamilton's bestselling fiction successfully mixes elements from the fantasy, mystery, and horror genres.

Hamilton was born in Heber Springs, Arkansas, but grew up in Sims, Indiana, a small town of about a hundred people. When her mother died in a car accident in 1969, she was taken in and raised by her grandmother, Laura Gentry. "I was raised poor," Hamilton told J. Stephen Bolhafner in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "Outside of schoolbooks, I was out...