Waterhouse began the Garner Quinn Mysteries with Graven Images. In this book, we meet Garner Quinn. We find out that she did not get the love she desperately needed as a child. Ignored by her father and deserted by her mother, Quinn turns her tragedy into fame. Now an adult and a successful true-crime writer, Quinn focuses all of her attention on her books, which are probing accounts of true-crime victims and villains. She just finished a story about "Bird" Turner, a country boy accused of a series of brutal murders but ultimately freed after the lone surviving victim recants her testimony. Now she has been asked to write about a controversial sculptor, Dane Blackmoor, whose life-sized works may conceal human body parts of his models.

Waterhouse's second Garner Quinn mystery, Shadow Walk, has its roots in Quinn's early adolescence. Sixteen-year-old Lara Spangler, a...