About Steven Mandel When he's not writing a new novel or researching the next, Steve Mandel earns a buck as an award-winning creative director for a Chicago ad agency. A life-long Chicago- area resident, Steve's a graduate of the University of Illinois-Chicago, degree in Communication and Theatre. And since the Theatre part was never really his thing, he decided to focus on the Communication. Thus he began his career in Industrial Public Relations. And quickly realized that he had to get out of Industrial Public Relations after researching and writing an article on the 50th Anniversary of the flat-head nail. So he entered advertising and found that he was good convincing people to buy things they really didn't need. Yet, while he enjoyed advertising, he knew something was missing. And after devouring novels from the likes of Eugene Izzi, Ed McBain and Andrew Vacchs to name a few, he realized that his true calling was to be a novelist. Yes…he thought…I will write books and take the literary world by storm! The literary world, however, had other plans. Plans, it seemed, geared toward keeping Steve querying agents and publishers for about ten years until he finally clicked with John Helfers and the good folks at Five Star. Still, that decade of trying to crack the world of the written word gave him plenty of time to work on his craft and find his voice. Steve's interest in law enforcement began with his father who worked for the Cook County Sheriff's Police. He was actually going to apply for the Chicago Police Academy after college, until his father talked him into getting a white collar job. Yet Steve never lost that love of police work or his fascination with the relationship between cop and criminal, which is why he set out to chronicle those lives as they fought and festered on the streets of Chicago. Over the past ten years, he's established a great relationship with the Chicago PD through many friends and relatives who are on the Job. Those relationships have allowed him access to the lifestyles of the cops and criminals and made him a proud survivor of countless ride-alongs with the CPD, primarily in the most crime-ridden neighborhoods of Chicago. But a man cannot exist solely in the world of crime. When he's not working, Steve listens to as much Jazz, Blues, Classical and Springsteen as possible, buys as many DVD's as possible (yet never seems to watch half of them) all while following his World Champion Chicago White Sox, his still-rebuilding-from-1985 Chicago Bears, and continuously losing at Texas Hold-'Em to his friends. Steve currently resides in the western suburbs of Chicago, with his wife, three daughters and a black lab named Jake.