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Mark T. Sullivan
Except for three years in Lancaster, PA, Mark T. Sullivan was born and raised outside of Boston in the towns of Framingham and Medfield. He was an avid skier and deer hunter as a child. He attended Hamilton College, graduating in 1980 with a BA in English. Two weeks after commencement, he boarded a plane bound for Niger, West Africa. There he worked as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Agades, an oasis and trading center on the ancient caravan route between Tripoli and Timbuctu. Sullivan rode with nomads deep into the Sahara, immersed himself in their culture and taught their children.
Upon his return to the United States in 1982, he attended the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, graduating with the highest honors. During that time he met his wife, Betsy, who was also attending the university as a graduate student. Sullivan worked at Reuters, Ltd., as a financial correspondent covering the Chicago Commodities Markets from 1983-1984. He left to become a political reporter in Washington D.C., at a small wire service called States News Service. His role was backup reporter to the D.C. bureaus of the New York Times, Newsday and the New York Daily News. He was also introduced to the field of investigative reporting, breaking a series of stories about a financial scandal that almost toppled the nation's mortgage brokerage business. At this time he was also introduced to the Japanese martial art of Aikido.
In 1986, Sullivan joined the San Diego Tribune as an investigative reporter. Still profoundly influenced by the experience of total cultural immersion he had experienced in West Africa, he began to develop a journalistic style that focused on the cultures of the things he was investigating. Twice in the next five years Sullivan was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting, once for a series that examined the lives and culture of children living with addicts, and a second time for a series that drew back the curtain on the culture and practices of corporate funeral home conglomerates. During these five years, he was lucky enough to become the personal student of Kazuo Chiba, one of the world's foremost Aikido masters.
Sullivan began writing fiction in his little spare time and soon had short stories published in various literary journals. In the winter of 1990, he took a leave from his investigative duties at the newspaper and moved to Utah and Wyoming to live among extreme skiers. That experience yielded his first novel, The Fall Line, (Kensington, 1994). Two years prior to the novel's publication, he quit the newspaper and moved to Vermont with his wife and young son.
Mark hanging in Neversink Cave while researching Labyrinth. In the next five years his family grew with the arrival of his son, Bridger. In an old converted barn where we lived, he wrote Hard News, (Kensington, 1995), a mystery that exposes the underbelly of modern newspapers; The Purification Ceremony, (Avon, 1997), a suspense novel set in the world of tracking deer hunters; and Ghost Dance, (Avon, 1999), a mystery set in Vermont.
That same year Sullivan moved to southwest Montana and began researching and writing Labyrinth. He was recently awarded his fourth degree black belt in Aikido and teaches the art in Bozeman, MT. His official website is http://www.marktsullivan.com.
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The Serpent's Kiss
A divorced, second generation homicide detective out of San Diego, Seamus Moynihan figures he's witnessed the worst kind of violence humans can visit upon one another. Then he's summoned to a crime scene where the victim, a naked man, has been bitten to death by a snake in a bizarre ritual orchestrated by a cunning and vicious murderer. To catch the killer, Moynihan must embark on a mesmerizing journey into a world of twisted eroticism, black-market herpetology, fanatical spiritual cults, and ultimately one of history's enduring mysteries: Who was the second woman? With the help of a Biblical scholar whose theories about the enigmatic wife of Cain may provide a startling link to the current investigation, Moynihan follows a twisting trail that leads to herpetologists on the cutting edge of television celebrity, Internet swingers exploring the dark depths of human sexuality...and a chilling fundamentalist cult in the backwoods of Alabama. As the mystery deepens, weaving together events of the distant and recent past, the veteran detective is forced to confront his own life's choices in a climax that threatens to destroy his sanity.
Mark T. Sullivan's Summer Reading List
Paranoia
by Joseph Finder
One of the best around reinvents the spy thriller, casting it in corporate America.
The Confessor
by Daniel Silva
Allon takes on the secrets of the Vatican.
The Sinner
by Tess Gerritsen
The master of the medical thriller at the top of her game.
Highwater
by Lynn Hightower
Pitch perfect prose in a psychological thriller set around a Marine camp.
Cold Pursuit
by T. Jefferson Parker
The thinking man's mystery writer, family secrets drive a thriller set on the San Diego waterfront.
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